


The Truth About Ghosts

by LadySilvertongue, patientalien



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Comics), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alcohol Withdrawal, Alternate Universe - Human, Angst and Tragedy, Attempted Murder, Blood and Gore, Childhood Memories, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Drug Abuse, Drug Addiction, Drugs, Everyone Needs A Hug, F/M, False Memories, Fire, Gen, Ghosts, Haunted Houses, Haunting, Horror, Hurt Thor (Marvel), Hurt/Comfort, Inspired by The Haunting of Hill House, Loki (Marvel) Needs a Hug, M/M, Protective Loki (Marvel), Protective Thor (Marvel), Psychological Horror, Repressed Memories, Seizures, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, Thor (Marvel) is a Good Bro, Thor Needs a Hug (Marvel), Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:15:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 52,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27264088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadySilvertongue/pseuds/LadySilvertongue, https://archiveofourown.org/users/patientalien/pseuds/patientalien
Summary: After the traumatic and almost mysterious death of their mother, the three children of Odin are sent to live with Heimdall, a family friend. Each of them learns to cope with their terrible loss and grief in different ways, some more healthy than others. As they grow up and away from one another, the memories of their childhood start to fade and change. When Odin dies, also traumatically and almost mysteriously, the siblings are forced back together again, to try to make sense of their family history and the madness that seems to plague them. But what happens when memories are fickle and malleable? What happens when the thing one fears the most... is oneself?
Relationships: Fandral/Loki (Marvel), Frigga | Freyja & Hela (Marvel), Frigga | Freyja & Loki (Marvel), Frigga | Freyja & Thor (Marvel), Frigga | Freyja/Odin (Marvel), Heimdall & Hela (Marvel), Heimdall & Loki (Marvel), Heimdall & Thor (Marvel), Hela & Loki & Thor (Marvel), Hela & Loki (Marvel), Hela & Thor (Marvel), Jane Foster/Thor, Loki & Thor (Marvel), Loki/Tony Stark
Comments: 21
Kudos: 56





	The Truth About Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> Mind the tags! This is a pretty dark fic, but it is a labor of extreme love. We wrote this on the heels of The Haunting of Bly Manor, and also drew inspiration from The Haunting of Hill House. Please let us know what you think!
> 
> There is also a Spotify playlist to go along with this story, which can be found [by clicking here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2OEy8ndQTBh9XnouNyc0ib).

[ ](https://imgur.com/zUJaj9f)

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

It is generally believed that reality and fiction are mutually exclusive. There can never be instances wherein both can exist in the same space, in the same span of time. Most academics and men of science would scoff at the whimsical, at the bizarre... the paranormal. To people like those, there is nothing science can’t explain.

To people like Thor... well, the distinction between the two has always been a blurry haze. 

When he was a child, it was because of... well, because of their experiences. Some odd, some just plain inexplicable, some sad, and some terrifying. 

As a man, the line is blurred by choice, with the help of drugs, and drink, and sex, and losing himself in anything that he can lose himself in. It’s no less odd, or inexplicable, or sad, but it is much, /much/ less terrifying.

Like how his reflection is distorted by the splashing of vomit into a toilet bowl rather than his face sloughing off in a fire he never even got burnt in.

Like how the swirl of colors are nice and vibrant, undulating in funny and hilarious ways, rather than the horrible twisting of shadows in the darkness.

Like how the moans he hears are made of pleasure rather than made of agony. 

Much, much less terrifying.

But, as with both reality and fiction, each always, always has a way of reasserting itself—whether by choice, or just rotten circumstances.

Thor is halfway through puking up the excesses of the night - he's not sure how he got home from the bar, but he must have somehow because this is his toilet - when his phone starts ringing. Shrill, insistent, cutting through some of the haze.

Thor flips his phone over with fumbling fingers; his sister's name shows up on the caller ID. The clock display shows 3:03 AM. "Mmm, 'lo?" he manages to answer. 

"Dad's dead," Hela says, direct and to the point as she always is. "You need to come home." 

Thor spits into the toilet bowl and slumps down against the side of the tub, leaning his head back against the cool porcelain. "Why shou' I care?" he asks. "I don' wanna be - I'm not - jus' leavvit 'lone." 

Hela lets out a very frustrated breath. "Figured it was too much to ask you to be sober," she snaps. 

"Ffffuck off. It’s Saturday nigh'." He thinks. "Why I gotta be there? S'Loki comin?"

He starts counting ceiling tiles to keep from puking again, but the damn things keep warping around on him, singed at the edges.

"Apparently he wrote us into his will, even after... everything. Heimdall said Loki would be there too." 

Thor nods, head dipping against his chest, then back against the edge of the tub. "When'sit?" 

"Loki should be knocking on your door any minute," Hela says, and sure enough...

Except Loki doesn't knock. "You know you left your front door wide open," his brother says, leaning against the bathroom door frame.

Thor sniffs and pulls the phone from his ear, wondering why the woman bothered calling when she knew Loki would be here already anyways. He doesn’t say goodbye, just hangs up and stares up at Loki.

His little brother looks good, despite the shadows under his eyes.

More put together than Thor is at the moment anyways. It used to be Loki that was always neck deep inside a toilet bowl, puking his guts out. Or curled up in the shower of Heimdall’s bath, drooling. Pissing himself. It used to be Loki who had a tough time getting through the steps in rehab. Guess he cleaned himself up pretty well, this time around, though to be quite honest, Thor isn’t even sure how long it’s been since they’ve been together in the same room.

So long that Thor supposes it could’ve been the only mutually exclusive thing that could happen. Though, if that were the case, Thor wouldn’t know which one he would be—reality or fiction.

“Hey, goo’lookin’.” 

Loki shakes his head, not even a smile for Thor’s efforts at levity. It takes more of the pleasant buzz Thor has tried to build up tonight, but this time he didn’t even need to puke.

“Whatcha doin here?”

Loki scoffs.

“Jesus, Thor... I know Hela told you. That was her just now, wasn’t it? Didn’t you... don’t you ever fucking pay attention?”

“Wha’ssat?” 

“Dad’s dead, Thor. Dad is fucking /dead/, and you’re too drunk to even understand that, huh?”

Thor pushes himself to sit up further, then uses the sink as a leverage to get himself to his feet. He brings himself up to his full height, until he stands a good inch taller than Loki. It’s about the only advantage he has that protects him from anyone, these days.

“Shut up. I told you. You an’ Hela. Said somthin’s not right but you—you!” Thor growls, and happens to catch a glimpse beyond Loki’s shoulder.

A silhouette dissipates from the shadows.

Thor closes his eyes, then opens them again and narrows them before meeting Loki’s own.

“M’stayin here.”

"Not an option, brother," Loki replies. "Let's go." He grabs Thor by the elbow and tries to manhandle him out of the bathroom. 

Thor doesn't want to go. If he goes back there, he'll start seeing all that shit again. Loki will start seeing that shit again, even. Maybe. And Loki seems to be doing so well. 

"Jus lemme... I gotta sleep, I gotta... I gotta..." He hiccups and slumps against his younger brother, unable to quite keep his feet. 

"You can sleep in the car," Loki says. "And God help you if you barf on the upholstery."

\-----------

THEN  
****

"Come /on/, Loki! You can't stay hiding the /whole/ game!" Thor stands in the grand foyer of the house and stomps his foot. 

Somewhere deep in the house, Loki knocks on the walls. Thor follows, winding through the hallways, passing through rooms he doesn't often enter.

"Loki!" he calls. 

"Brother," Loki says, from the opposite direction of the knocking. Thor whirls around, catching a glimpse of a shadow as he turns. 

"Don't sneak!" Thor scolds. "And stop tricking me." 

But then he chases Loki down the hall, and the knocking is forgotten.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
*******

Loki glances over at his brother, slumped in the passenger seat of his beat up blue Honda. He tries not to feel guilty. He'd gone to rehab on his sugar daddy's dime, come out the other side, and he had left Thor behind.

Which isn’t to say that he’d turned Thor away or rejected him completely. It isn’t to say that he tossed Thor aside and forgotten about him... but Loki had let Thor push him away. It was getting to the point where it was becoming toxic, was toxic—for both of them, and Loki—and everyone else—had suffered for it.

Thor, leaning too heavily on Loki for everything, and Loki, not knowing when to say no. They didn’t have boundaries, got so co-dependent that neither of them could move forward without dragging the other back.

It got to a point where Loki breathed a sigh of relief when he finally said enough.

He doesn’t regret it, focusing on himself, but still. 

Still...

Seeing Thor now, still like this, still /haunted/... it makes Loki’s chest ache with grief he hasn’t felt in a long time. Fills him with it when not even news of Odin’s death had. 

His phone chirps with a text message, and while he isn’t a stranger to the dangers of texting and driving, Loki pulls it open anyways.

From: Hela  
3:26am

Got him? You two on your way?

Loki sighs, then types out a quick response.

To: Hela  
3:29am  
Yeah. Be there soon.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
****

“Moooooom! Loki’s hidden my dolls again!”

Loki’s head jerks up at the sound of Hela’s whining, and he glares up at where her voice had come from, letting the book he’s pretending to read fall to his lap. Okay, so maybe he sometimes /does/ play with Hela’s dollhouse and dolls—who wouldn’t? It’s the exact same building as their house, and even the dolls are accurate!—he wasn’t even near her room this time around!

“I did not!” He squeaks, standing up just as she appears at the doorway to mama’s reading room. “I was right here all day!”

Frigga hums, backing Loki’s statement, “I have to agree with Loki, my dear, he hasn’t left my side since this morning.”

“Thor, then! Daddy’s doll is missing, and he’s the only other one who would do such a stupid thing.”

“It wasn’t Thor either!” Loki huffs, because he knows Thor wouldn’t be caught dead with one of the dolls. Besides... “They just like moving around sometimes. Maybe if you gave them more /exciting/ things to do, they wouldn’t go around exploring.” 

“You’re such an idiot.”

“Hela!” 

Just then, Thor comes padding into the reading room too, a huge grin on his face.

“Hurry up and get dressed! Dad said we’re going to get ice cream!”

Loki lights up, the issue taking a back seat in his head, and while Hela still looks pouty, she’s the first to leave to put on some nice clothes. Later, when they get back and Frigga tucks Hela in, Loki spots the little Odin doll already in its bed from where he’s perched on his mom’s side.

Hela must not have looked too hard earlier then. 

But it’s alright.

He forgives her.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**********

Hela drums her fingers against her opposite arm, trying not to make it look too much like she's hugging herself. No, she's the only damned adult in this entire family, which means she has to act like it. Loki's managed to stay on the straight and narrow for a while, but he's always been a slippery little shit and for all she knows, he's just milking his newest conquest for all they're worth. 

Thor, well....

Thor is his own problem altogether. And, as far as Hela is concerned, a bit of a lost cause. Still, Heimdall had been very specific about Odin’s instructions. All three of them come home. 

She takes a step back as a car pulls up to the curb outside the funeral home and out steps first Loki, dressed in a suit that probably cost more than his car. Then comes Thor, looking hungover and rumpled, but still managing to be wearing all black, down to those stupid fingerless gloves he'd started wearing just before he'd left Heimdall's care for good. He seems sober, at least, sunglasses on and a cardboard cup of takeout coffee in his hand. 

"Hi," she says to them, not really knowing what else to say. She hasn't seen either of them in person in years.

She’s sent checks, sure, bought one or both of them spots in multiple rehab centers through the years, too. She’d sent holiday cards, and birthday cards, and get well soon cards, good luck cards, whatever the hell cards whenever each of them hit a milestone.

Twenty five now?

Here’s a card!

Sixty days sober?

Card! 

Got an apartment in NYC?

Card!

It was that simple. It was that fucking simple, and then... and then it just wasn’t. Just like when they were kids, the rug got pulled out from under them, and they just never really bothered to work through it.

They were never really able to work through the night of the fire either.

“So,” Hela says, her breath making a crisp fog on the way out. “Lets go get the old man from the freezer.”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
****

Hela doesn’t much like being the only girl in the household most of the time.

Mama doesn’t count, because she’s an adult, and sometimes Hela wishes she had a younger sister to play with her the way Thor and Loki are always playing together. They never invite her either, when they’re playing knights and kings, or cowboys and outlaws, or any of the rough and tumble games they play out in the garden or the trees.

It’s why she’s delighted when, after their father has cleaned out the attic, he presents her with the most amazing replica of their current home. It’s complete with furniture too—all that’s really left to add are—

“We need to make us!” Loki chirps happily after he’s done going through the box of older looking dolls that came with the model house. “Oh mama, can we please, /please/ make us?”

“Yuck, why would you wanna play with /girls/ toys, Loki? Are you a little girl?”

Frigga giggles when Loki’s cheeks flare red, but Hela feels a swell of excitement that her youngest brother seems at least interested. If she’s being honest, she can see a bit of a spark even in /Thor’s/ eyes.

“How about us three make them together?” She suggests, smiling a little. “Mama, can we have your crafting things?”

Hela doesn’t hate her brothers. Not at all. They can be loud, and annoying, and more than a little mean sometimes, but mostly, they just... don’t have something that all three of them can share.

“Can I give myself a /skateboard/?” Thor asks excitedly, following after them now. “And a beard, and an eyepatch!”

“That’d look nothing like you!” Loki laughs, and Hela joins as well at the ridiculous mental image it conjures in her head. “But if we’re allowed to make changes... I’m making myself taller than Thor.”

“In your dreams!” 

“First one who gets mom’s stuff gets to be the taller one!”

Loki’s laughter and pounding footsteps echo down the hall, having sped ahead, and Thor, after he regains his composure, follows soon after.

Hela stays with Frigga’s pace and rolls her eyes. “They’re so dumb. They don’t even know where you hide it, mama.”

“And that’s why you’re my cleverest child,” Frigga says with a wink. “How about we give both of them dresses?”

Hela grins up at her mother, and takes her hand, following behind the rambunctious shouting of her younger brothers in the distance of the hallway.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
*******

Thor doesn't go downstairs with Hela or Loki. Instead, he stands in the receiving room of the funeral home and stares at where, in just a couple of hours, Odin's coffin will be. He blinks rapidly to clear his blurring vision—tears, rather than chemicals causing it this time—and resists the urge to turn right around. 

Grab a cab. Get the hell out of here.

Go back home, get well, forget about any of this.

Forget what he had felt the night before, what he had been out trying to drink and drug and fuck away in the first place. Before Loki kidnapped him, dragged him here. 

He paces back and forth across the room, struggling to keep himself from reaching for the flask in his jacket pocket, trying to keep himself from bolting. 

Too much. This is all too, too much. 

\-----------------  
THEN  
***********

"Quit knocking!" Thor yells through the wall at his brother. Loki delights in knocking on the walls, tapping on the windows, moving things around. 

He loves making Thor feel crazy, and he loves denying that he's doing it. But Thor knows it's just his brother. 

Of course it's just his brother.

Except. Except. 

Except sometimes, Thor can see other things. Things that aren't his brother or sister. Things that follow his mother from room to room. 

But that's just his imagination, that's all. 

Nothing but his imagination.

And if Loki says odd things sometimes, like how Hela’s dolls all have a story and have lived in the house, or that he dreams of them, well—that’s just Loki with his overactive imagination too. 

And if Hela almost always knows exactly where they all will be based on that dollhouse, that can be chalked up to mere coincidence too. 

Dad always says there’s a scientific explanation to everything that happens. A realistic explanation. Even if mama says it’s magic sometimes. 

Thor tucks himself beneath his blankets and comforter again, closing his eyes resolutely. He’s almost asleep when it starts back up again, this time it’s louder. Thor cups his hands over his ears and closes his eyes shut tighter.

The banging is everywhere.

On his door.

On the wall.

On the ceiling.

Bang.

Bang.

Bang.

Bang.

Wood just rattling and rattling and rattling and exploding and—

\- - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
***********

Thor opens his eyes with a jump, flinching away from the hand on his shoulder. It’s owner quickly withdraws too, hands coming up placatingly. Loki and Hela stare at him as though he’s grown two heads. 

Thor shakes the sound from his ears—tries to calm down and tell himself that Odin is /not/ banging on his coffin lid, that his father isn’t even /in/ a coffin yet. He clears his throat and faces his siblings.

“Sorry. You said you’d take a bit,” Thor brings his stale cup of coffee to his lips, taking two big gulps. “So uh... are we gonna have to uh... pick a coffin or—“

“About that,” Hela sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Apparently they aren’t done with his body yet. They need to do a few repairs and shit since it was a while since somebody found him. Oh, shit—I don’t think I mentioned it on the phone—“

“He hanged himself,” Thor cuts her off, licking his lips and trying to keep himself from trembling. “I know.”

“How did you...” Loki starts to ask, but then shuts up when Thor gives him a look.

Loki should know how he knows.

Loki fucking—

“Oh please, not this shit again. We aren’t kids anymore, and I’d appreciate if you’d stop acting like you’re ‘special’ just because she told you you were.”

Thor scoffs, lowering his coffee down, sniffling. All these years... all these years, and she /still/ knows which buttons hurt the most. 

“I told you. I told /both/ of you. I /told/ you there was something /wrong/!

“You having a relapse and dad dying aren’t connected. You are not /fucking/ special.”

“I don’t have to be here, you know,” Thor warns. 

“I kind of wish you weren’t,” Hela hisses.

Loki doesn’t even try to get in between them. 

“Well then why the fuck did you call, huh? Why have Loki bring me here? We all know he’s got jack /shit/ to leave us with, so why fucking bother? Maybe you’re trying to get a sequel out? Have enough material yet?” Thor spits at her, not even trying to contain his voice, not caring who might overhear. 

“We’re here because he was still our father,” Loki says softly. 

Thor barks a laugh, “Really? Because I remember waking up in the fucking hospital, a fucking tube down my throat, with my mom dead and my /father/ throwing me away like fucking... as far as I know, Heimdall raised me. Heimdall did. Odin? Him? He’s /not/ my father, and us? Us three coming here, playing at family? We’re not. We’re not a family—we’re a—we’re a fucking /time bomb/!”

The silence left after his tirade is absolute. Thor can’t even hear their breaths, or his own panting. He doesn’t even realize he’s crushed his little pathetic excuse for a coffee.

“He’s not your father? We aren’t your family?” Loki says, his voice oddly choked.

“No.”

“Why are you crying, then?”

Thor reaches his free hand, shaking, trembling, and not just because he hasn't had a drink or a hit all day, and touches his cheek. Tears. He touches his tongue to his fingertips, tastes the salt. Real. 

"Go fuck yourselves," he snarls, storming down the hall and out the front door of the funeral home. He needs some air; it feels too much like there's a rope around his neck.

\---------------

THEN  
***********

"You're so special, my darling." Frigga's eyes sparkle with mirth, the edges of her mouth pulled up in a sweet smile. A smile she saves for Thor. "My little spark."

Thor beams up at her. "How am I special, mama?" he asks, letting her take his hand and lead him into her warm and cozy sitting room. 

Frigga smiles down at him. "You see, my love, you have a gift. It might not always seem like one, but it will always be there for you, and if you learn how to use it...."

"Don't fill the boy's head with nonsense," Odin says as he crosses the hallway and disappears into his study.

\---------------

NOW  
**********

"Just leave it," Hela sighs, watching Thor storm out. "He'll go get high and then he'll come back." It's what he always does, when faced with any semblance of emotion. When faced with even a sliver of reality. 

"Yeah," Loki echoes softly, and she looks at her youngest brother for the first time in a long while. 

"You look better, at least," she says, throwing a bone to the one of her brothers who actually seems to be putting in the effort. 

Loki shrugs, hands shoved in the pockets of his pants. "I've got somebody who gives a crap about me now," he offers, though he gives no further details about who this new somebody is. "Thor could use some of that."

Hela scowls. Thor has effectively ruined every good relationship he's ever had with anybody.

“Yeah, well, he needs to get his fucking head straight and stop the whole nonsense about the powers.”

Hela doesn’t say anything more, just takes out her phone to send a message to Heimdall, updating him. They’ll need to occupy themselves until Thor shows his mug again, and Hela could do with seeing their old guardian again. 

Just as Hela is hitting send and about to tell Loki to meet back up later, her youngest brother speaks up.

“Why don’t you believe it?”

Hela observes Loki’s face, sees that he’s serious. She decides to make it harder for him. They aren’t really playing this game again, are they?

“Believe what?”

“Any of it. All of it,” Loki says with a scowl. “You saw what I saw that night... you saw it too when Thor was... when he...” here, Loki cuts off, turning his face away. “And what Thor says he saw—“

“Thor has PTSD, and so do you. Fuck, all three of us. So what we /thought/ we saw... it was nothing but a stress response,” Hela says, knowing Loki is at least amenable to a little logic. To science. “Your therapists have said it. Mine have. I’m betting Thor’s therapists have said it too.”

“It just... it doesn’t make sense.”

Hela snorts, “Nothing in our family makes sense, little brother. Nothing ever has. That’s the only thing that does.”

She leaves him and gets into her own car, taking a few minutes to breathe... to erase the image Loki had planted in her head.

Nothing in their family has ever made sense. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

THEN  
***********

“What are you doing here?” Hela asks Loki, raising an eyebrow curiously at the open box on his lap, and at her dollhouse, where most of them have been set up. “You should’ve asked for my permission first. This is my room, you know.”

“Sorry,” Loki says with an impish grin, turning back to the toys and moving two as she makes her way inside. “Right on time.”

Hela looks at the figures Loki had moved, and freezes when she sees that it’s her mini version. There’s a different doll with her though—one of the older ones in the box.

“Who’s that?” She asks as she kneels beside him.

“Hm?” Loki asks as he grabs another figure—this one moving it next to Frigga in her reading room—then comes back to himself. “Oh, him. I don’t know yet. He likes following you sometimes though. I think he really likes your hair.”

As Loki says that, Hela feels a cold chill run down her spine before she feels a phantom hand touching the top of her head. She doesn’t even notice that Loki is moving Thor’s little doll figure until he barges into the room. 

Thor’s face is equal parts terrified and murderous as he stomps over.

“Hey, what are you—“ Hela starts.

She doesn’t get to finish as her younger brother grabs the figure that had been with Hela’s and runs from the room. She gapes open-mouthed at the empty doorway, turns back to Loki, whose attention is still on the toys, then gets to her feet and runs.

“Thor! Give that back!” 

She catches up to him at the balcony overlooking the garden right before he throws it over the rails. Hela loses sight of it as it lands somewhere in the foliage.

She grits her teeth and turns to her brother, shoving him hard. He shoves right back.

It’s a full on physical fight from there as she claws at him, and he grabs at her hair. She doesn’t know how it happens, but Thor ends up stumbling and landing on his butt. Tears spring up in his eyes almost immediately.

It should be /her/ that’s crying!

“I’m sorry. I had to. He was going to hurt you.”

“/You/ hurt me! I’m telling dad!” She snaps, stomping back inside, “and stay out of my room!”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
********

Loki pulls out a stick from his pack of cigarettes as soon as he hears the sound of a car starting, pulling it between his lips and lighting it up. He gets a disapproving tut from a woman who comes out of the door with ‘Employees Only’ written in a hurried penmanship, the paper of it yellowed. It’s as though someone wrote it there years ago and just said ‘fuck it, it works, we don’t need anything more’. 

Loki heads for the doors and steps out too, going over to his car and leaning against the hood. 

He finishes his stick, and then two more before he pulls out his phone and dials Thor’s number.

It rings and rings and rings, goes to voicemail. Loki hangs up and calls again. This time it goes straight to voicemail. Loki huffs out a sigh, lights yet another cigarette. Of all his vices, it's the one he can't seem to kick all the way. 

He feels a tickle in the back of his head and so he tries one more time.

"Third try's th'charm," Thor's voice, thick with opiates and who knows what all else, comes over the speaker. 

"Where are you?" Loki asks. He couldn't have gone far without a car, at least. "I'll come get you." Already he can feel the invisible threads that had bound him and Thor together those years they were both using starting to form again, knit back together. 

"D'you remember the Inside Out Man?" Thor asks suddenly. 

Loki's mouth goes dry. Hela would tell him that Thor is just... being Thor. That his imagination and the drugs are turning his mind to mush. That he spends more time in fantasy than in reality. 

But Loki remembers the Inside Out Man. "Just come back," he chokes into the phone. "Please. I don't want to do this without you." 

Thor might complicate things. He might hurt Loki's recovery. He might just - well, there are a lot of mights. Coulds. But Loki is sure he doesn't want to step foot back in Odin's house without Thor there.

"Gimme fifteen minutes," Thor requests. "Just needed..." Loki knows exactly what Thor needed, so he simply hangs up. 

He hasn't thought about the Inside Out Man since... he can’t even remember the last time. Maybe not since childhood. He wonders how often Thor thinks of... any of it.

Often, he's sure.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

********  
THEN

"Shh! Shh!" 

Thor shoves Loki's head down as they both cower under Thor's bed. The knocking on the walls is growing louder, pounding hard enough to rattle window frames and the photos on the wall. One of them falls, and Loki yelps as it hits the floor and shatters.

"Shut up!" Thor exclaims. "Whatever you do, don't look." Thor himself has his eyes wide open. Loki keeps his open too, brave, like his brother. 

The door to Thor's room creaks open. Loki sees a pair of feet and legs from under the bed, not mom's or Hela's or dad's. The feet don't walk like normal feet. They drag across the floor. 

Closer.

Closer.

Closer.

Loki holds his breath. Beside him, Thor is trembling, his hand firmly over Loki's mouth. 

The feet stop beside the bed. The body attached to the feet starts to bend. Thor scurries backwards, further under the bed, dragging Loki with him. 

The figure keeps bending. Loki sees long bloody bone fingers - longer than human, he thinks - curl around the edge of the bed, then...

Then the face. Fleshless but bloody, a smile as wide as its entire self. Loki screams. 

And wakes up curled around Thor in Thor's bed, his brother's arm tucked protectively around him. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

*****  
NOW

Thor stares at his reflection in the middle of the gas station bathroom, and at the reflection of the figure behind him. 

The wide wild smile of the Inside Out Man never dims. 

Thor chugs down the rest of the contents of his flask, gathers up his spoon and needle, and heads back to his brother.

He makes his way to the funeral home without much incident, even if he could hear a second set of footsteps behind him all the way there.

Thor spots Loki pacing around his car well before he’s even close enough to make out his brother’s features, but his eyes narrow on the glowing embers of a cigarette tucked between the younger man’s lips. Loki looks up and spots him—almost as though he’d already known Thor was there—and waits until they’re just a couple of steps from each other before he takes the thing out of his mouth and stomps it out.

Thor can feel the swirl of poison in his own lungs, his throat feeling rough. He doesn’t mean to, but he’d probably been glaring at Loki, because his little brother looks down.

“Sorry,” Loki says softly.

Thor schools his features, smiling a little. He knows Loki knows—he knows Loki doesn’t mean to make him feel the fire in his lungs again either. He walks over and slings an arm around his brother’s shoulders.

“I dunno ‘bout you, but I’m hungry, n’you look like you could get some sleep.”

“You’re not driving my car.”

“Who’d wanna drive that rusty piece of shit?” Thor grins, throwing his head back and laughing at Loki’s mock aghast look. “C’mon. We’ll go to the diner we always went to—you know the one? Wha’s it called?”

“Bennie’s,” Loki answers, slipping from under him. “It closed already. We passed the building on the way here.”

“Oh.”

Loki tilts his head towards the car, shoving his hands into his pockets again—an old habit that hasn’t left him since he’d started having night terrors. 

“I saw a breakfast joint though. We could try it out.”

Thor stares at Loki, then nods and hops into the car, pulling off his gloves as he puts his seatbelt on. Loki climbs in too. Thor deliberately doesn’t acknowledge the figure sitting behind them when Loki adjusts the rearview mirror. His brother tenses up, too, but doesn’t give any other outward reaction. Just rubs his eyes, and Thor notices again that they have several bags under them.

“After breakfast, we’re bookin’ a motel and you’re gonna sleep.”

“Sure.”

They drive in silence and get to the place Loki had mentioned in less than ten minutes. The food isn’t anything mind blowing, and Loki, Thor notices, is spaced out for most of it. He doesn’t bring it up, even when they leave and half of his brother’s food is still sitting on his plate.

Once they’re in the motel, though, Thor ushers Loki to go to bed, and the younger man climbs on eagerly. The breath he lets out is one of deep relief. Thor has a nagging feeling that his brother hasn’t been sleeping very well.

“Wake me up if Hela calls,” Loki tells him, then rolls over and slumps even further into the sheets.

Thor walks over and pulls his brother’s boots off and tucks the blanket around his shoulders. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

THEN  
***********

Thor doesn’t like that mom set him and Loki up in one room after they tell her about the Inside Out Man. There are plenty of /other/ rooms in the house, and Hela still gets her own, but he’s stuck with Loki, however temporarily.

Dad hates it too, saying they’re too old to be believing in ghosts and other things, but mom somehow managed to convince him.

Well... it’s not that Thor really /hates/ this arrangement, since it makes it that much easier for him and his brother to stay up and keep playing even when it’s bedtime, but he doesn’t like it either. Thor especially doesn’t like it when Loki is climbing into bed with him and jolting him out of his nice dreams.

He groans, pulling his arm from Loki’s own skinny ones—skinny, but his brother clings on so /tightly/. Loki’s legs are curled over Thor’s, too, and his brother’s feet and limbs are /cold/. Like an octopus. 

“What now?”

He hears sniffling, and groans even more, turning his head to look at his brother.

Loki’s green eyes are wide with fear, and they’re leaking tears that’ll make an uncomfortable damp spot on Thor’s pillow if he doesn’t stop it soon. He sighs, turning to lie on his side.

“Another nightmare?”

Loki nods once, and Thor sighs again. He reaches up to brush inky black hair from Loki’s forehead, then pulls at the blanket to wipe his brother’s cheeks dry. Once that’s done, he cups the back of Loki’s neck and presses their foreheads together. The terror washes over him, and Thor feels his heart double its speed despite not really knowing why. He quickly dismisses it.

“You’re safe, little brother. I’m right here.”

Loki gives him a shaky smile and pulls back, only to latch onto Thor again, burrowing against his chest. Thor lets him, rubbing his brother’s back until Loki’s breathing evens out, the little whistling sound he makes when he sleeps that usually annoys Thor now making him feel relieved.

It isn’t long before Thor falls asleep too.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**********

Loki wakes up, but he can’t move at all. 

He knows this feeling, knows what it is. It’s his sleep paralysis acting up—his body just the slightest bit delayed in waking up than his head is. It’s not surprising, considering the day he’s had, and he knows the exercises he should be doing to get himself out of it. 

The fear still grips him first either way.

It’s too dark, and too quiet, and he doesn’t know where he is. In his mind, his breathing should be quicker, he should be gasping and panting, but instead it’s like his lungs are getting crushed.

A door creaks open behind him, and the terror triples. He starts making choked whimpering noises, which makes the air in his lungs feel even more depleted, and there’s something coming—something is coming—he can hear the footsteps—he can see the horrible fucking face already and—

“Hey, hey, shh, Lo, it’s me. It’s me. I’m right here,” comes Thor’s voice, and then his face is right there too. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

Loki whimpers even more, though the terror has lessened significantly, replaced by a feeling of embarrassment at having been caught freaking out. 

“Hey. You got this. Y’remember what to do? Fingers and toes first,” Thor soothes, his brother’s hand cradling his own as he gets a couple of fingers to twitch. “There, that’s it.”

“Gimme that signature scowl,” is his brother’s next instruction, and Loki does.

The feeling of his face moving is foreign, but it helps as well. With multiple fingers moving, getting his mouth to part is what breaks the spell, and the lock he’s trapped in releases. Thor helps him sit up.

“There you go, big breath now. Good job.”

Loki heaves, pulling his hand from Thor’s loose hold. He wraps his arms around himself and just tries to breathe. 

“You haven’t had one of those in a while.”

Loki looks at Thor and glares, “I wonder why.”

“I didn’t do shit.”

“You brought him—you brought /it/ up.”

Thor raises his hands—gloved again, Loki notices vaguely— and shakes his head. "I'm sorry, I just—"

"You just never know when to leave well enough alone," Loki snaps, embarrassment and exhaustion cutting through any patience he might have had. 

Thor just nods, and scoots off Loki's bed.

"I know," he says. "Uh, it's still dark, you should try to go back to sleep."

Loki scowls at him anew, but does as Thor has instructed. 

He doesn't get very far.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -  
THEN  
**********

"It'll help you sleep," Thor assures him, holding out the little white pill. "It's totally safe. Fandral gave them to me."

Loki reaches out and plucks the pill from Thor's palm.

"What is it?" he asks.

Thor lowers his voice as if this is some sort of big secret. "It's oxycontin," he says, and Loki is pretty sure Thor shouldn't have something like that. "It helps, trust me. Just - just don't tell Heimdall or Hela."

Loki nods. If this will help him sleep... if this helps /Thor/ sleep... He pops the pill into his mouth. 

It's the first time since That Night that he's able to sleep through the night.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
***********

Thor crouches in the bathroom of the motel room he's currently sharing with Loki, shaking hands holding the spoon over his lighter, waiting for his medicine to cook up.

"Come on, come on," he mutters, something close to urgency in his tone. He hears boney fingertips tapping on the bathroom door.

It nearly makes him drop the spoon, but he manages to hold onto it and keep his composure long enough to take his drug. The effect is immediate, if a bit too strong, but in this case, it’s a welcome oversight. Just as long as he doesn’t really go overboard and cause an overdose, everything is going to be /fine/.

He needs this, and more if he’s going to be forced to go back to the property. 

Shit, even just in the same fucking town is enough to bring all the ghosts back—and he’s not even talking about just the actual fucking ghosts. 

There’s a reason he moved so far away, after all.

He would’ve stayed away too, if not for that fucking phone call. The last time he’d talked to either Hela or Loki before he called them to warn them about Odin was the year after his first and only OD. He’d hurt them both enough by that point, and he just didn’t... didn’t want to keep making them hurt.

Now he’s back here, and just as he’d known, all the nasty things are lurking just right under their skin.

They’re a time bomb, he was right about that much, and then add the fucking actual ghosts—plus his siblings’ ire...

He hears the wheezing right at the door to the bathroom just as he’s about to get up. He doesn’t want to, but he feels compelled to look over, and there, the charred, twitching figure that’s haunted him his entire life is standing.

“Oh fuck,” Thor gasps, turning to look at the wall in front of him. The tiles are cracked, and the shower head and handle are speckled with rust. “Fuck... fuck, go away. Go away.”

He closes his eyes and brings his knees up to his chest, making himself as small as possible.

“Go away. Go away...” Thor opens one eye, just a peek, but it’s still there. “Fuck. Fuck. Go away. Fuck.”

After a minute passes, Thor starts his little mantra.

“One, two, three, four, five...

One, two, three, four, five...

One... two, three, four... five...”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
*************

“... four... five...” Loki’s voice rings distantly, and Thor tucks himself deeper in mom and dad’s closet.

“... six... seven... eight... nine... ten! Ready or not, here I come!”

Thor holds his breath, biting his lip to contain his laughter when he hears charging footsteps passing outside the room.

He hears Loki request for the first noise.

Thor slams his hand against the door. 

He hears Loki request for the second one.

Thor gives another bang.

He hears Loki requests for the third one.

... and before Thor’s hand can connect to the wood, there’s a loud ‘thud’ from behind him.

Thor startles and whirls around in the dark of the closet but only finds himself tangled within mom's long dresses. There's nothing there, and Thor takes a minute to calm down his breathing. 

It's nothing. The old house settling, Odin had explained when Thor had insistently asked about the knocking and tapping and thudding he hears even during the daytime. 

It’s just the house settling. 

He closes his eyes and waits for Loki to pull the closet door open. He waits and he waits. 

He waits and waits. 

There's a rustling of fabric, the squeak of hangers shifting on the rod. And then...

Thor bursts out of the closet with a shout when the bony fingers close on his shoulder, running directly into Loki.

"You dummy!" Loki exclaims, punching him in the arm. "You ruined the game again!"

Thor apologizes, but he never hides in that closet again. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
***********

It's been at least ten years since Heimdall has seen all three of Odin's children in the same place. 

Thor had been the first to leave, once everything had fallen apart, throwing a duffle bag into the back of his girlfriend's van, off to New Mexico and far away from the rest of them. During one of Heimdall’s weekly check-in calls, Thor had admitted he and the girl had broken up, but that he intended to remain in the desert.

Loki was next. First in prison, then without his brother to cling to and get high with, going from one place to another, one job to another, one man to another. Into and out of rehab, struggling to undo the years of codependency. 

Hela stuck around the longest, but even she eventually moved away, using the pain and the misery of her childhood to write best selling novels. 

And here they all are again, in varying stages of normal. 

Hela looks stressed, but put together in her black dress, black heels, her black hair pulled back into a severe bun. 

Loki is similarly well-dressed; Heimdall knows the man Loki is now with. Trusts him, even likes him to a point. Loki hadn't brought him along, which means Loki might not have told him about... everything. 

Thor is... well, he's dressed appropriately, at least. But he's also half-asleep, slumped in the chair, head lolling to pillow against Loki's shoulder. 

"I'm sorry these are the circumstances that have brought you all home," he says.

None of them say much of anything. Hela and Loki, remaining to choose silence, and Thor... well.

Heimdall sighs, taking out the box with all the things Odin had left for the children. Mostly books, some documentations, and years upon years worth of personal journals. He’d gone over the will already, but it isn’t any easier to see the proof of his old friend’s burden. 

The house, after Frigga’s death, became Odin’s obsession. With his children under Heimdall’s care, and no wife by his side to sway him, the man became a recluse. 

He refused to leave the grounds, not even to buy his needs, and was absolutely adamant about not letting anyone else into the property. The man had started looking into the history of the town and of his parcel of land, tracing ownerships and lineages and anything he could get his hands on.

Heimdall doesn’t know what he found, but the instructions he’d left... 

“This will be hard for you to—“

“Can we get on with the reading?” Hela interrupts, looking away when he tries to catch her eyes. “The service is going to start soon. Besides... this can’t be as bad as... well. You should know.”

Heimdall does, he sighs and starts reading.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**********

Heimdall doesn’t know what he was thinking, agreeing to look after Odin’s children, especially when he didn’t even have any experience in that regard. It wasn’t exactly clear how long it would be, though, so he’d said yes when the man had asked.

Now, as he sits with Hela and Loki in the hospital room Thor is still in, two weeks later, he finds that perhaps he should have another talk with the man.

Thor hasn’t woken up from his coma, Loki hasn’t said a single word, and Hela has been asking difficult questions—questions Heimdall himself doesn’t have any answers to. It should be Odin here with his children, not him.

It should be Frigga here.

At the thought of his friend’s late wife, Heimdall feels his chest ache. There’s absolutely no way he can fill the role of the children’s father—and there’s no way he can fill the role of their lovely mother.

It kills him, that he can’t do anything for them but sit here and wait. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
***********

Hela stares at the piece of paper on the table, eyes not leaving it, the words written on it that Heimdall had read blurring in and out. It’s... it has to be some fucking joke, right? Or a mistake—maybe this isn’t Odin’s will. No, there’s /no way/ this is Odin’s will.

This is some crazy man’s will that had somehow gotten mixed up with their late father’s. 

“You’re shitting me, right?”

Heimdall frowns and shakes his head. "I'm afraid not. Everything is in order, he was in his right mind when the will was written."

Hela scowls darkly, because there is no possible way her father had been in his right mind. He hadn’t been in his right mind since That Night, none of them really have been.

Hela will be the first to admit how much therapy she's had to undergo in order to quantify and explain what had happened That Night, and the events leading up to it.

No one who has ever set foot in that house could possibly claim to be in their right mind. 

Beside her, Thor shifts slightly, reaching out for the papers. "Lemme see," he slurs, though Hela doubts he's going to be able to actually read the damn thing, how doped up he is. 

But Thor clearly can read it, because he pales significantly and then stands. "I can't, I'm sorry, I can't." He shakes his head. Rakes a hand through his hair. "I can't, I won't, I'm sorry, I can't." 

He leaves the room quickly, shaking his head as he goes.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -  
THEN  
**********

The heat is unbearable. The fire is contained to this room so far, but it's a near thing. And Thor is frozen on the spot, unable to move, held in place by spindly bone fingers, watching as the Thing in his mother's body..... Because Frigga would never do this. It couldn’t be her. The only explanation is...

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
*********

Thor splashes his face with water and avoids looking in the mirror above the sink as he dries himself with a paper towel. 

Another hit. He could take another hit. It would take away his fear, his pain. It would take away the memories. 

And if he were anywhere else, he would. He would supplement it with something else, too. Some Xanax, some crack, /anything/. All he has right now besides his heroin is a pint bottle of vodka. 

He's halfway through it before the bathroom door opens and Loki walks in. "Didn't chugging a pint in thirty seconds land you in the hospital once?" his brother asks, crossing his arms.

"Yeah, fifteen years ago," Thor snaps back. "I've had practice since then." 

Lots and lots of practice.

"Hela and Heimdall sent me to make sure you were okay," Loki explains, as if any of them actually /care/ how Thor is doing.

It’s a bit of an unfair thought, considering he can actually /feel/ the concern dripping from Loki when he’s this near, but that’s really just part of the problem, isn’t it? 

It’s all /because/ he can feel every little thing that made him so fucked up in the first place. It’s because of the fucking ‘gift’ he has, that nobody even believes in, that’s made his life a literal hell to live through. As if the constant noise from other people’s emotions and mental states weren’t enough, Thor just had to be special and see fucking ghosts too, right?

“Come on. Let’s go back. I know how hard this must be for you, but I promise—“

“Oh, you /promise/?” Thor snaps, glaring at Loki through the mirror. “What do you promise this time, little brother? Do you promise to always have my back? D’you promise you’ll be here for me? Or, or what was it? D’you promise you’ll believe me this time when I say something?“

“You can hardly blame me for not always defending you, Thor. You were hardly any better than me or Hela,” Loki answers back, a bite of heat in his words. “Just... come back. We can talk about how we’ll deal with the house.”

Always with the /fucking heat/.

Always with that /fucking house/.

“You fucking know what’s waiting for us in that damned house. You /know/. You’ve fucking seen it!” Thor bellows, his voice bouncing off of the walls in the empty bathroom. “I can’t go back. I’m not going back.”

“Thor—“

“No, /fuck you/. Fuck you for even—why are we even talking about this, Loki? What are we even going to do it for? The old man is dead! He won’t know /shit/, and you were never one for listening to him and his rules anyways, so what fucking /for/, Loki?!”

“I need my goddamn family, okay?!” Loki explodes, and Thor pulls up short.

Not because he’s afraid of his brother, and not because he’s surprised either. He pulls up short because Loki looks gutted, and there are tears in his eyes. He looks like he’s aged far beyond his years right at that moment. 

“You think it’s been any easier for any of us, Thor? For Hela? For me? For /dad/ when we left him?” Loki continues, sniffling and rubbing at his eyes.

“We didn’t leave him. He fucking gave us away.”

“You’re missing my fucking point,” Loki snaps, “we all lost mom. /We all did/. We’ve just lost dad, and now we’re going to fucking lose each other and none of us are even dead yet...”

Thor’s shoulders slump.

He’s so fucking tired.

“What do you want me to say, Lo? What do you want me to /do/?”

“I just—“ Loki starts, then he crumbles completely. “I just need my goddamn brother for a while. At least until... I just need what’s left of my fucking family.”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

THEN  
***********

Thor turns away from Loki, who’s sitting on the chair next to his hospital bed. It’s been exactly two days since he’d woken up with something shoved so deep into his throat he’d choked on it, and the news that his father... won’t be coming to visit him.

Hela and Loki have been hovering incessantly, and Heimdall has been asking every other hour if he needs something, but Thor... he knows they can’t give him what he really needs.

Even he doesn’t know how he can get what he really needs.

“Do you want some water?” Loki asks for the umpteenth time, the scrape of his chair against the floor grating on Thor’s ears. “Or a candy bar? There’s a vending machine at the cafeteria. I could go and get you anything you’d like. Or I can get you something from Bennie’s, I’ll ask Heimdall to—“

“Shut up, Loki!” Thor sits up and yells—or he tries to anyways.

It comes out as a weak rasp, and has him coughing for a minute straight after. Loki shrinks away all the same, his little face tight and drawn, too pale, the shadows under his eyes too deep. His lips wobble, and his eyes get a telling sheen, but he doesn’t cry.

“Sorry. Sorry, I—“

“You can’t get me anything. I don’t /need/ anything from you. I just want you to be quiet so I can sleep! Go away!”

Loki’s hold on his composure breaks, twin tear tracks running down his cheeks before he bolts. Hela stands and follows after him, but before she goes through the door, she glares at him.

“You’re really horrible, you know. He just missed his big brother. We both just miss our brother, but I guess you don’t care. Not about us, right Thor? Because you’re so special?”

Hela scoffs when he doesn’t look at her, and leaves. Thor lies back down on his bed and cries himself to sleep. 

He’s still alone when he wakes up. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
***********

Heimdall isn't surprised when both Thor and Loki return to the office within twenty minutes. Loki's eyes are red with tears, and Thor's are red from liquor. Loki gives Thor a careful look before they both sit again. 

"I don't wanna go back," Thor says with a shaky, shuddery breath. "But I—it’s what mom would have wanted." He nods, sharply, once. 

Well, good. One hurdle over with.

Now for the details.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**********

"Details, my little spark, listen to the details." Frigga smiles and cups her hands over her ears. "Sometimes the veil is thick, and you must listen very carefully to understand."

Thor cups his hands over his ears too, listening like momma had said. For the details. 

The brush-brush of a long dress sliding down the hall.

The shrill cry of a child.

Screaming. Screaming. Screaming! Thor claps his hands over his ears to try and block it out as Frigga tries in vain to console him. 

Screaming. And heat. And darkness. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

NOW  
*********

"I need to make a stop first," Thor announces as he gets into the passenger seat of Loki's car.

Loki watches his brother out of the corner of his eye, taking in the trembling, the sense of fear and anxiety wrapped all around Thor. He can guess what kind of stop he needs to make.

"I don't want that shit around me," Loki snaps. "I've got a year and a half, don't fucking do this to me." The longest he's been sober since Thor had introduced him to the joys of recreational pharmaceuticals. He's not about to ruin everything he's got going for him.

Certainly not since he wants very much to be able to go home after all of this. Back to his real life, away from the nightmare.

Back to his friends and the relationships he’s formed, to the job he’s managed to keep and learn to love despite bitching about it, back to his apartment in New York and the man who also lives there. Back to where everything is normal, and good—even happy sometimes. 

The muscle on Thor’s jaw clenches. Loki starts the car and pulls out of the driveway, fully intending to just follow the hearse. No fucking stops.

“Loki,” Thor says, his voice pleading. “I’ll just—just one dose. I’ll just get one dose, and—“

“Thor—“

“/Please/. I can’t. I can’t—you know that I—please Loki. Please, /please/.”

Loki turns to look at Thor, then scowls at the look on his older brother’s face. God damn it. God fucking damn it.

“Fuck you...”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
************

“Loooooo, c’mon, jus’ one more,” Thor slurs, reaching for the bottle of beer that Loki has just confiscated from him. “Yer’ fffffuckin’ dramatic.”

Loki glares, walking over to the sink that’s heaped with dirty dishes, upending the bottle and letting the liquid drain. Fandral is snickering in the corner as he pops something into his mouth, and Loki shakes his head at the man. 

He’s glad for the supplies he sells them, but he doesn’t approve when the man goads Thor into overdoing things. Mixing and experimenting with what they have? It is crosses the line of simply overdoing things and borders on fucking suicide.

And Thor would never... Loki knows his brother wouldn’t want that. 

He’s just reckless. 

Just reckless.

“You’re such a killjoy, man,” Fandral snorts. He comes over to the fridge and pulls out a large mason bottle, waving it at Loki. “Let him have a beer in a bit, aight? I’ll let him hydrate.”

He brings it over to where Thor is slumped, uncapping it and handing it over. Loki glares at both men.

“We’re going home.” 

“Nuh uh,” Fandral chuckles.

It’s then that Loki realizes his mistake, as Thor chugs the contents of whatever the man had given to him. Loki dashes forward and slaps the container out of Thor’s hand, but there’s barely anything left in it as it flies and shatters a couple of feet away. 

Whatever is left, though, smells /strong/.

“What did you just—Fandral, what was that?”

Thor’s hand flops up and grabs at Loki’s shirt to haul himself up, but his grip is too loose and he ends up face planting onto the floor before rolling himself to grin up at Loki. Not long after, he starts throwing up, splashing vomit onto Loki’s shoes, and back onto his face. 

He starts choking on it.

“Fuck!” Loki gets to his knees, turning Thor onto his side as he throws up even more. “I’m going to kill you, Fan.”

“You’re such a—“

“Thor! Thor?” Loki says loudly when his brother slumps bonelessly after a bout of dry heaving. Thor only grunts, breathing noisily through his mouth. “Go call 911. Fan, go call a /fucking/ ambulance!”

Loki sits there and makes sure Thor is still breathing until paramedics arrive. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
***********

Thor is feeling perfectly splendid as they pull up to the property.

Well, maybe not perfectly, completely splendid—meaning wasted til’ he can’t tell his left nut sack from his right one—but he feels just well enough that he’s too out of it to even form any cohesive thoughts. Too out of it that he can pretend they’re pulling up somewhere else.

Somewhere /not/ here.

“We’re here,” Loki says, and even his little brother’s voice is distorted. 

Thor doesn’t much like /that/, but at least Loki’s /feelings/ aren’t leaking into him. Otherwise, Thor would know just how much Loki hates him right about now.

Or maybe always.

It doesn’t matter.

He's under no illusions about this: he knows Loki and Hela barely tolerate his continued existence. It’s one of the reasons he's stayed off their radar for so long. Easier just not to think about any of it at all.

It's impossible not to think about any of it as the tires crunch on the gravel drive. Thor feels the trees close around him, feels the weight of the house bearing down on him. 

He shakily uncaps his flask, taking a pull despite Loki's scowl of disgust. Just to make it a little easier.

Easy. This should all be easy. 

Loki pulls up to the front of the house, and Thor stays where he is, planted in the passenger seat, staring up at the imposing facade. 

He knows it only /looks/ empty.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -  
THEN  
*********

Thor stares up at the gigantic house, the windows like many eyes, unblinking. He feels a shiver run down his spine, but it's just Hela, playing a trick. 

"Don't! Mom, tell Hela to stop!" 

"Are we really gonna live here?" Loki asks, awed. 

"If we ever manage to get out of the car," Odin grumbles from the driver's seat. 

Thor keeps staring up at their new home, until the slamming of the car door....

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

NOW  
********

.... jolts Thor out of his stupor enough for Loki to manhandle him to his feet. After that, his brother is on his own. 

It used to feel perfectly normal to prop his brother up, used to feel right that they did this all together. They used to lean on each other, sneaking back into Heimdall's house in the wee hours of the morning. 

But that was years and years ago, and Loki is better now. What his brother does is not normal, or healthy, but neither is Thor's brain. 

Being without oxygen for that long... now that he's older, he understands better what that had done to Thor. Hela seems less inclined to make allowances, and Loki doesn't want to get dragged down again.

Thor has had plenty of chances to choose a different method of coping with his pain. This is what he's chosen.

Loki feels his face pinch when the first thing Thor does once he's out of the car is throw up in the gravel in front of the front steps.

He waits, though, until Thor manages to get himself upright again, even if he does look like he’s about to fall over, listing and wobbling as he is. The hearse is there, and the people from the funeral home that’ll carry Odin’s coffin are already waiting. So are Hela and Heimdall.

Loki heads over towards them, Thor ambling along behind him, and meets his older sister’s eyes. She’s looking him over, trying to find something, and gives him a tight lipped smile. It takes Loki a moment to realize that she was checking to see if he’d gotten high too.

He tries not to let that get to him.

He knows he isn’t exactly the best example when it comes to successful rehabilitation, the number of times he’d relapsed is probably at the same range as Thor’s, but this time it really is different. It stings, but Loki is determined to prove to Hela and Heimdall, and mostly to himself, that he’s better. That he can cope now and handle stressors just fine.

“Let’s head out back,” Heimdall says, and they allow the pallbearers some space to move before following after it.

They circle around the side of the house towards the backyard, further still towards the edge of the property and nearer to the woods, where there’s a small private cemetery, a grave already dug farther apart from the headstones that are already there.

They stop, set the casket on a metal frame, and one of the people from the funeral home asks if any of them have any words to say, but only Heimdall offers up a little something. A small piece of the Odin that he knew.

Loki both appreciates and envies that.

Appreciates that his father was at least a good man before... well, before, and envies that he didn’t know that man. Didn’t get the time to get to know that man.

When Heimdall is finished, the one who’d spoken earlier says some stuff that Loki isn’t really paying any attention to, and then they’re moving to lower the casket into the ground. 

It used to creep Loki out, being here, and it still does. None of the people buried here are their family. Not even Frigga was buried here, though technically, Frigga wasn’t buried at that other place either. No, that was just an empty coffin.

The one being lowered into the hole in the ground /now/ though... that’s a different story.

It seems to take forever, but then Hela is moving forward, leaning down to pick up some dirt. She throws it into the ground, it sprinkles all over the pristine white of the box they’d picked out for Odin. No matter how ornate, it’s still just that... a box for the dead.

Loki sniffles, and in the privacy of his thoughts, promises Odin that he’ll try. He bends down and grabs a full handful of dirt like Hela had done, the feel of it in his hands making him nauseous.

And to think that he used to delight in this stuff...

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
*************

Loki absolutely /loves/ the feeling of the earth. He especially loves it when it’s warmed by the sun on a nice bright day, and the entire family is outside in the garden. It’s even better with the promise of snacks and a bit of fun after they’re finished with the chores. 

It makes for a perfect day.

Thor has a worm and is chasing Hela around with it, dad is over at the overgrown brush pulling weeds out so they can replace it with some flowering plants after having mowed the lawn, and Loki is helping mom dig holes in the dirt. She doesn’t even care that his hands are a little muddy, that there’s some gross bits under his fingernails, or that his shirt and shorts are all stained.

She just continues to hum, a smile on her face, and Loki keeps digging his little hole.

“Mommmyyyyy! Tell Thor to stop!”

“It’s just a little worm!”

“Darling, stop teasing your sister,” Frigga chides gently.

Loki looks up and giggles. Thor has his arm pulled back, and sure enough, the poor little worm is arching through the air not long after. Hela shrieks and runs away, bending down and tearing a fistful of grass to throw Thor’s way. It misses completely, scattering in the breeze before the blades can even find their target, and Thor is back to digging through the ground to find more things he can tease Hela with.

Frigga shakes her head and laughs.

Loki gets a bright idea then, reaching over for Frigga’s watering can and filling his dirt-hole with water. She raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t interrupt when he starts making his slush.

“Mama, can I?” Loki asks.

He has a handful of slushy mud, looking up at his mom and finding her suppressing a grin. He looks over at dad, and the man is eyeing him, before giving a wink of approval. Loki giggles and walks over to where Thor is, still on his knees and digging.

By now, Hela has paused too, watching them curiously.

“Brother,” Loki calls sweetly—

And splatters the slush on Thor’s face when his brother turns to look.

Loki shrieks as he runs for cover behind mama. Thor is sputtering, swiping at his eyes as they all share in the mirth. At first, Thor seems like he’s going to be angry but then... then—

“Oh, you’re /so on/!”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**********

Thor tries his very best not to pay attention to anything. Not to what’s being said, not to what’s happening, and definitely not to the feeling of foreboding churning in his stomach as his siblings both toss some dirt into the grave. Onto the casket.

It could just be the alcohol. 

Hadn’t Loki always told him that it was bad to drink on an empty stomach?

Or do drugs on an empty stomach?

Something?

An elbow digs into his side, and Thor jolts from his thoughts, rubbing at the spot and glaring at Loki. The younger man glares right back, though, and Thor notices that everyone is waiting, staring at him.

It makes his skin crawl. 

It makes his skin crawl because it isn’t just /them/ staring at him. That’s the problem—always has been. He can feel more sets of eyes on him than the ones he can actually see are looking, and he doesn’t like that one bit. The sooner they’re done here, though, the sooner they can leave, but Thor can’t quite figure out what the others are waiting for.

Well, he sort of knows. He has an idea. He doesn't like to think about it. So he's not. Going to think, that is. Nope, nice and thoughtless, that's how Thor likes it. 

But he's supposed to be doing something right now—oh right. He leans over to grab some dirt—he has to put a hand on the ground to push himself back upright—then shuffles to the hole. 

That's all it is, just a hole in the ground containing a man who had abandoned them. Not even the man, just his body. Thor can't remember the last time he talked to Odin, not including the warning he had gotten just before. 

He leans over, opens numb fingers to sprinkle the dirt, when boney fingers wrap around his ankle and he's pulled into the hole with a surprised yelp. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**********

"Where's Thor?" Heimdall asks.

The middle child is hardly ever late for meals, but Thor has been withdrawing as of late. Heimdall has every intention of making sure the children are given therapy as soon as possible. 

Thor especially. 

"You two start without us," he suggests to Hela and Loki, getting up to call Thor to dinner.

He doesn't seem to be in the house, but when Heimdall looks out the window, he sees the boy standing in the backyard, a blank and slack look on his face as he stares up at the sky. 

He hasn't moved by the time Heimdall gets out to stand beside him, and doesn't answer when Heimdall calls his name. 

\----------------  
NOW  
***********

"Thor! You fucking idiot!" 

Hela can't believe it. Well, she /can/ believe it, but she had hoped she wouldn't have to deal with it today, of all days. Was it really so much to ask...

Heimdall and a couple of the funeral home attendants pull Thor out of the open grave, her brother absolutely freaking out, asking if anyone saw a hand pull him in.

"All I saw was somebody with more booze than blood in his system fall over," Hela snarls. "You're so embarrassing."

Thor doesn’t even acknowledge the jabs, just keeps muttering as his arms come up to wrap around himself, shaking his head. Hela manages to make out the soft litany of no’s, not yours’, not one of you’s that fall from Thor’s lips before the man turns away from the grave and lowers himself to the ground. He sits there and rocks himself back and forth. It’s honestly so... so fucking pathetic that Hela’s anger skyrockets, so she lets herself act on it.

It’s better than acting on the confusing mess of other emotions swirling inside of her, anyways. She can deal with those when she gets back home.

Besides... anger is easy.

“Get up,” she tells him, standing right in front of the blonde.

“Hela...” Loki starts, but she doesn’t give him the time to come to Thor’s rescue.

Not again, not anymore. She’s done letting Loki ruin himself by justifying Thor’s issues for him. She’s done letting them all coddle the man.

“No, he needs to learn that he can’t just fucking do whatever he wants all the time. Get /up/,” she hisses again. This time, Thor does look at her face, but his gaze is as blank and far away as ever. “Get your fucking shit together for /ten fucking minutes/, and then you can go bury your head in a mountain of drugs and booze, but you are not doing /this/. You’re not making /another/ funeral about /you/!”

Thor just stares right past her.

“/Get up, you fucking asshole/!”

“Hela, that’s enough,” Heimdall scolds, shaking his head. The man’s voice turns somber. “We didn’t come here to fight... please.”

Loki walks over towards them and lays a hand on her shoulder. Hela meets his eyes. The grief that’s there manages to dampen the white hot rage she feels, but it’s the clap of thunder overhead that makes the decision for her.

She takes a deep breath, then loops her arm around Loki’s, letting her youngest sibling lead her back, and together they watch the grave be filled.

Just like last time.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

THEN  
**************

Hela has Loki pressed close to her chest, both of them sobbing as Frigga’s empty grave is lowered into the ground. Heimdall’s one hand is on her shoulder, the other is on Thor’s, standing on the opposite side of him. They hadn’t had a service for mama or buried her until Thor woke up, but it isn’t any easier with the three of them. 

While she and Loki can barely breathe through the tears and the sobbing, Thor is just... he’s just standing there.

He’s not even crying.

Heimdall had tried to explain that her brother might not act like himself when he woke up, but she hadn’t expected him to be a complete stranger. The boy standing there isn’t her brother—Thor loved mama so, so much. He wouldn’t just /stand there/. Thor loves Loki too, and yet that day in the hospital, he’d made Loki cry and has been ignoring him since. Ignoring them /both/.

It scares Hela a lot.

She’d lost her mother, and her father since the fire.

She doesn’t want to lose Thor, too.

When it’s finally time to start covering the casket up, Loki wails even louder, and Thor is still just standing there. Hela wishes he’d cry, or scream, or do /something/. /Anything/ would be better than just him standing there like another dead person!

As soon as she has that thought, though, she immediately regrets it.

Thor does none of those things she had hoped he would do.

Instead, Thor starts /laughing/.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

NOW  
***************

As soon as the grave is full, Heimdall thanks the attendants and sees them off at the cemetery gates, thanks them and tells them they may go ahead. When he turns back, Thor is still on the ground, Hela and Loki are still in front of the freshly filled grave, and Odin is still dead.

Not that he had expected Odin to come back to life, but he had been hoping those letters and the contents of some of the more recent journals would have a little merit. He shakes his head at himself for being such a fool, but he supposes that is the ghost that he needs to deal with—that longing for that one last conversation he never really got around to.

Overhead, thick clouds start pouring in, and he sighs as he walks over towards the children—older already, all of them, but to him, they will always remain that.

“Let’s head inside. I stocked the pantry up just in case... I have tea and some food there.”

"Tea sounds good." Loki speaks first, his voice hoarse and his nose stuffed. He's not looking at Heimdall, though, he's looking at Thor, still on the ground despite the rain starting to patter down. 

"You and Hela go ahead inside. I'll be along." 

Heimdall understands why Hela is upset with Thor. Why Loki is upset with Thor. Heimdall knows why he himself is upset with Thor.

No, not upset with Thor. Upset /for/ Thor. For a boy to lose his mother so violently, so traumatically, to suffer physically himself from the act Frigga had committed... 

"Come have some tea," he says, coming up to stand beside Thor. "It'll make you feel better."

Thor snorts. At least it's some sort of response. Heimdall holds out a hand. Thor takes it, and lets himself get hauled to his feet.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**********

"Come have some tea," Heimdall requests, holding a hand out to Thor as he sits in the wet grass. "It'll make you feel better."

Thor remains silent, staring down at the blades of grass he is plucking from the lawn. Pluck. Pluck. Pluck. All go into a little pile in front of Thor's crossed legs.

"I'm not angry with you," Heimdall tries again. "I just want to make sure you're alright. Come have tea."

"I don't /want/ tea!" Thor explodes, leaping to his feet and running back into the house, slamming the door as he goes. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
********

Loki makes tea the proper way, with a kettle and loose leaves. He does it with ritual and purpose, a way to ignore everything else. He used to enjoy the ritual of shooting up with Thor, but things have changed.

Now he makes tea.

He doesn’t even remember /how/ he’d learned to make it this way, he’d just had a craving for it one day, and was disgusted with the crap Tony had put out, so he’d gone and bought himself a kettle and actual dried leaves, and showed Tony how it’s done proper. The man had grumbled that it was too much of a hassle, but he’d let Loki do all the tea-making ever since.

The thought of the man makes him smile a little, eases the tight knot of grief and anxiety that’s been building up in his chest since that morning, and pours them all a cup. 

Hela mutters a terse ’thanks’, Heimdall says it with a tone more grateful, and Thor... well, Thor pushes his cup away when Loki sets it down in front of him.

He sighs, sitting down at the table and wrapping his hands around his own cup, though ‘cup’ wouldn’t be an accurate term for his own special glassware. Mug, more like, it’s huge, with fancy trimmings, and the handle is a snake, each detail delicately sculpted from the scales, to the eyes, to the flicking tongue. He’d almost forgotten about this mug—he should definitely bring it back to New York.

He clears his throat after a sip, then looks around at the people gathered. The fractured remains of his family, “I’m uh... I’ll book a flight back home, after we finish up here.”

“Finish up?” Hela echoes, raising an eyebrow. “What’s there to finish up?”

“In dad’s will—“

“No,” Hela cuts him off, shaking her head. “I’m not staying here and reading over... I don’t want to take another glimpse into how dad’s mind went from being cooped up here all these years. Anyone would go crazy.”

“He wasn’t insane,” Thor mumbles, keeping his eyes on the tabletop, his hands clasped firmly together resting on his knees. As though he doesn’t want to touch anything in here.

Hela scoffs, “Right. Of course. I assume you’d know what you’re talking about in that regard, huh?”

Loki sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. He’s so tired of them just fighting all the damned time. So tired of not getting the space and time to just /be/ and to just /grieve/ and talk about their losses. None of them have ever talked about that first loss, nor the many things that came after that they should’ve talked about.

“Can we not?” He requests. Pleads, really. “For just one fucking minute, can we be an actual fucking family again?”

He needs that the most right now. And if they leave this place without Loki having ever felt that again? He doesn’t know how that’ll affect him, doesn’t know how that’ll make him feel. Especially since between the three of them, he’s the only one that actually knows...

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

THEN  
*************

Loki is going on a year and six months into sobriety when he gets close to slipping again. So fucking close, and all because of a single phone call from the person he least expected it from. 

It comes without any precedent.

It a normal fucking day, everything right according to routine, until his phone rings with an unregistered caller ID. Loki doesn’t even know how the man had gotten his number, but when he answers his phone, he nearly doesn’t recognize the voice that calls him.

“Loki. Son.”

The instant he places whose voice it is, he freezes. Nothing else comes, and Loki remembers himself. His voice is shaky and breathless when he answers.

“D-dad? Is that you?”

"Loki," Odin says, "listen to me very carefully." 

Loki grips the phone tightly against his ear, disbelief making his head swim. He picks up his lighter with his free hand and flicks it on and off, nervous, tense. "I'm... I'm listening, dad."

"I should have told you a long time ago," his father says. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry for that." 

"Told me what?" Loki asks, sitting, still flicking the lighter on and off. 

Flame.

Dark.

Flame. 

Dark. 

And when Odin tells him, tells him the truth of the lie he's been fed his entire life, that he is /one of them/, an Odinson, all Loki can do is sit there. 

"Why are you telling me now?" he asks when he thinks he can speak again. 

"Your mother asked me to."

Loki, cold, hangs up.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
***********

"What are you doing?" 

Loki's voice startles Thor enough that he nearly drops the bottle of brandy he has liberated from Odin's study.

"Don't sneak!" he snaps. 

There's enough sneaking around this house without Loki doing it too. He barely has any more smack, and can't go get any more unless Loki brings him—which Thor is sure he won't—so this is his best bet. Best bet to stave off the sickness, and best bet to stave off the ghosts. 

He just has to get through this. It will be over soon. He gets through this, he can go back to the trailer in New Mexico and not have to think about any of this ever again. 

"Who says you're going to be leaving?"

"What?" Thor asks, turning, realizing too late that the voice he'd heard isn't Loki's.

"I asked what you were doing," Loki replies calmly. "But you answered my question. Are you..." Loki looks like he wants to ask a million things, but seems to settle on, "Okay?"

Thor snorts and pours a generous measure of brandy into one of the snifters on the desk. Wouldn't want to offend delicate sensibilities by drinking straight from the bottle. 

"Will be," he says, nodding at his drink. 

"Aren't you drunk enough already?" Loki hisses. "When I said I wanted my family, I meant you, too. The /real/ you."

Thor laughs, humorlessly. "The real me died the night mom did."

Loki walks over, and Thor readies himself to fight and wrestle for the liquor, but instead his younger brother closes his hands around Thor’s wrists. Just like that, Loki’s emotions flood into him, and there it is again. The grief, the sadness, the thick, cloying loneliness... it’s too much and too heavy to be just from Odin’s death.

Thor wonders if there was something he missed. 

“Stop it,” He tells his younger brother, resisting the urge to knee the little dick in the crotch for touching him deliberately where his skin is exposed. “Let go.”

“Aren’t you gonna ask?”

“Ask what?” 

Loki let’s go then, his face closing off, eyes growing dim. He looks like what Thor imagine he himself looks like on a daily basis. 

Hopeless. 

Joyless.

Dead inside.

“Dead soon.”

Thor lifts the glass to his lips and takes long, a deep gulp, hoping it’s enough to wash that voice out of his head.

Wash away the feeling of the room twisting around them.

Wash away the deadened look on Loki’s face.

“You really don’t give a shit anymore, huh?” Loki says, his voice as flat as his expression.

“Do you?” He fires back, topping his glass back up again, “S’a problem with you, Lo. When it comes to me, you only believe whatever’s convenient. And you only care whenever it’s convenient too.”

Loki takes two steps backward, turning his face away. Hurt, Thor feels.

Good.

/Good/.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**********

Thor looks at his phone, then attempts to redial the number one more time. After all, third times the charm—though he isn’t sure how many times he’s actually dialed it.

He brings the phone up to his ear, but the same automated message plays.

‘This number has been disconnected.’

Thor lets himself fall heavily on the park bench, his fingers are starting to feel stiff and fidgety all at the same time.

Loki can’t have disconnected his number, right? Not without telling Thor first. Not without giving Thor another way to reach him. His brother wouldn’t do that—wouldn’t just cut off all connection when Thor hadn’t even /done/ anything.

Hell, they haven’t even seen each other since the big fallout! Since... well since Loki... got locked up...

He considers calling Hela and asking her, but Thor knows his number is /definitely/ blocked on that front. But Loki...

Why would Loki do this to him?

He wouldn’t.

Right?

Except, three months later, Thor still hasn’t gotten any word from his brother. He would’ve thought Loki /died/, if he hadn’t known that wasn’t the case at all, if his little curse is to be believed. And Thor does believe in his accursed ‘ability’. 

Maybe Loki just needs to cool his head.

Or something. 

Maybe his new sugar daddy is the jealous type.

Thor gives his brother the benefit of the doubt. After all, he /knows/ how exhausting he can get. Loki deserves a break from... well, from Thor.

It’s another three years before he gets a text from an unknown number telling him it’s Loki. Thor forgets about it until the evening he’d felt Odin’s paranoia.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
***********

Hela walks across the halls of the house, trying to see if anything has changed in all the years she’s been away.

Amazingly enough, nothing has, even everything that the fire had burnt away... well, Odin rebuilt it exactly as it had been. Everything is still the same, from the places where the beams of the roofing are exposed, down to the floorboards, and which ones creak. 

Or maybe that’s just her and her mind playing tricks on her

After all, memory can be a fickle thing.

Her feet, unbeknownst to her, take Hela back to her old room, and the door to it is just as she remembers too. She lays a hand on the knob, but hesitates. Somehow, it’s the sight of her old bedroom door that makes her feel uneasy.

She lets her hand fall to her side, and she takes a step away. 

“It’s probably empty,” Hela tells herself, then turns from the room to head down again. She shakes her head as she feels her heart calm it’s frenzied beating, “fucking stupid... of course it’ll be empty.”

Of course it will be. What else /could/ it be. She scolds herself for buying into Thor's persistent delusions and steps back and opens the door.

The hinges creak at the first movement they've been made to perform in more than twenty years and then Hela is there, in her room, her dollhouse spread before her in all its glory.

She steps into the room, once again scolding herself for being so jumpy, and makes her way over to the dollhouse.

Oh, how she had loved this, and the dolls so lovingly created both by her and whoever had been its previous owner. She picks up the one of herself, the one standing in the simulacrum of her own bedroom. The dolls of Loki and Thor, and at least one of the old dolls, are in Odin's study. The doll of Heimdall is in the kitchen. 

The dolls of Odin and Frigga have fallen to the floor. She picks them up gently, smoothes their clothes and hair, holds them tight to her chest. Only then does she allow herself to let go, and cry. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
***********

"Where's Loki?" Thor demands, barging into her room without even being invited. 

Hela glances over at her dollhouse. "He's hiding in the pantry," she says, noting the location of the doll representing Loki. "Learn manners."

She goes back to her book, and Thor goes back to his search.

She can hear the pounding of Thor’s footsteps as he runs down the stairs, and Hela rolls her eyes. After a couple of minutes of silence, Thor barges in again. Hela glares at him as he runs towards the doll house and grabs the miniature version of himself.

“What are you doing?”

“Playing smart,” Thor answers with a smirk, then places the thing inside the box of the older dolls. 

“Cheater,” Hela says with a small laugh.

Thor sticks his tongue out at her before running to his hiding spot. A minute later and Loki is in her room, demanding for the same thing his older brother had. Hela shrugs, pointing towards the box.

Loki expression changed, and he looks a little scared, coming over to dig through the box and taking out the mini-Thor. He brushes the doll’s hair and carefully places it in its own room, standing there and looking at the scenes. Hela, slightly unnerved by his stillness, asks what’s wrong.

Loki shakes himself out of it and smiles, running off.

Not even thirty seconds later, she hears Thor and Loki running again, off to play a different game.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
***********

The gloom from the thick clouds overhead make the day seem darker and bleaker than it should be, the steady downpour showing no signs of letting up anytime soon. The cascade of rain hitting the roof, the windows, is supposed to be a welcome sound—a calming one.

Instead, Thor finds it puts him on edge. 

He wishes the deluge would stop soon, no matter how much he has missed the rainy weather. Right now, it’s essentially trapping him here.

Heimdall rattles around in the kitchen, where Thor has taken residence after his and Loki’s little spat. It should be the last place he wants to stay in, considering this is where... well, where most of that night had gone wrong for all of them, but there’s a calm here that Thor hasn’t felt in any other room.

It's a calm enough feeling to allow him to sit there without a drink for as long as it takes him to eat the grilled cheese sandwich and soup Heimdall had made for him. 

He feels guilty as he eats it, knowing truly that he doesn't deserve Heimdall's continued kindness. Even after leaving, even after Heimdall had cut him off financially, the man had still always treated him with kindness.

"I realize how difficult this must be for you," Heimdall says suddenly, pulling a chair up beside Thor at the kitchen table. "But I do hope by the end of it, you'll... find some closure. Some peace for yourself." 

Thor just nods, dipping the last half of his sandwich into the soup before shoving the whole thing into his mouth to keep from having to reply.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**********

"Thor, just eat the soup." Heimdall sounds frustrated, but Thor doesn't really care. What he /does/ care about is the fact he got dragged out of bed at the crack of dawn after he and Loki had been at Fan's all night.

Heimdall hasn't dragged /Loki/ down here, which means either he doesn't know Loki was out, or he's going to talk to Loki separately. Thor doesn't like it when Heimdall separates him from Loki like this. 

Bad things happen when he and Loki are apart. 

"Not hungry," he mutters at the table. 

Heimdall sighs and Thor can hear the chair beside him scrape across the floor as his guardian sits as well. "I know how difficult things have been for you," he says. "And I hope this is something you will forgive me for."

Thor is about to ask what Heimdall means when Hela comes through the door and says, grimly, "The van is here." 

"Wait, what?" Thor is on his feet immediately, soup forgotten, as he realizes what's happening. 

"It's a beautiful facility upstate," Heimdall says, soothingly, as if that's going to do any sort of damn thing to stop this from happening. "You'll be there for thirty days, then you can come home." 

"But Loki... I can't leave Loki!" His breath is coming faster and faster and suddenly he can't breathe at all. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
*********

Loki looks down at the scattered journals and letters in front of him, spread out in front of the huge fireplace in the formal sitting room. 

Hela might be overly analytical, and Thor might be delusional, but Loki just wants to know the truth.

And maybe, just maybe, he can find some bits and pieces of that in his late father’s innermost thoughts—it’s too late now to ask him, after all. Loki wonders why they’d never bothered. 

They were children when everything went wrong, true, and Loki had been fucking around with Thor for the longest time afterwards, but after? Loki can only blame himself for not reaching out, for not giving Odin a chance to speak for himself.

“Uncover the secrets of the universe yet?”

Loki sighs, turning back to look at Hela. 

Her eyes look slightly puffy, but he doesn’t dare to mention it, lest he trigger her walls to come back up. Loki knows his sister, knows that her go-to response to anyone addressing her emotions is anger, not much unlike Thor. In that regard, Loki can say they’re the same.

Must run in the blood.

Their blood.

“What is it?” Hela asks, and Loki turns back to the journal on his lap.

“Nothing. Just a bunch of half-formed thoughts on paper,” Loki tells her, ignoring the tight feeling in his chest at the sudden reminder. “I could use another set of eyes to read through these.”

“Really?” Hela snorts, “I can understand Thor buying into Odin’s insanity, but you?”

“I’m just trying to find some answers here. I need to lay this house and all it’s ghosts to rest, or it’s gonna follow me everywhere.”

Silence follows, and then the distinct click, click, click of Hela’s heels. They stop right beside him, and Loki looks up. She doesn’t meet his eyes, but opens her hand.

“Give it here.”

“I’m assuming there’s a caveat?”

“I know I shouldn’t, but I’m thinking about writing that sequel Thor mentioned.”

Loki shakes his head, but hands her one of the journals nonetheless.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - 

THEN  
********

Loki loves his father, despite how distant and aloof he seems sometimes.

Odin is different with Loki than he is with Hela and Thor, but Loki knows it’s just because he’s younger than they are, and because he’s a bit of a troublemaker. A little trickster, mama calls him, and he’s proud of that title, even if he’s earned it by getting himself in trouble.

Like now.

But—but! This time, dad is wrong, and Loki isn’t the one who scribbled on the walls of the study with crayon. Loki doesn’t even /have/ crayon—or... well, he doesn’t know where his box went, but the point is he doesn’t even have anything to scribble with.

Besides, red is /Thor’s/ favorite color. 

If Loki was gonna do something like this, he’d have done it in green!

“You are going to clean this mess up, and then you’ll stay in your room until dinner, am I understood?”

“But dad, it wasn’t me!”

“Oh? ‘Run away’, who else would write such things? And so crudely too.”

Loki frowns, looking at the doorway where Hela and Thor are observing the spectacle, peering into the room clandestinely. Neither of his older siblings come to his defense, even if all three of them have been in the garden since they’d gotten up this morning.

“I don’t know who it was, it wasn’t me.”

Odin huffs, shaking his head. “No more from you, young man. To your room. And you’re grounded tomorrow too, for lying.”

“What?” Loki shrieks a little, feeling a bit horrified. “But mama comes home tomorrow! You said we’re going to fetch her and we’ll get ice cream!” 

“Well, you should think about the consequences of your actions next time. And you two,” Odin looks at the doorway, Hela and Thor guiltily coming out from where they’re hiding. “I don’t like you eavesdropping, and I don’t like that you’ve left your little brother alone.”

“But dad—“ Thor starts, but immediately gets cut off by Hela.

“We’re sorry, daddy. We’ll keep an eye on him and make sure he cleans up.”

Odin eyes all three of them before he grunts in approval and leaves, heading back outside to finish tinkering with the car. Loki turns to look towards his older brother and sister, pouting.

“It wasn’t me.”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**********

Thor stands on the threshold of his old bedroom, trying to decide if he wants to push the door open or not. They'd left in such a hurry. He hadn't even been conscious. All of his things must still be here, because he does remember Heimdall buying them new clothes and toys. 

He isn't sure he wants to see any of it. He certainly doesn't want to /be here/, and he can tell by the way the house is twisting and misleading him this way and that, that he is unwelcome.

Maybe they all know what Thor and his siblings are here to do. 

"My little spark," comes from inside the bedroom. "Come here, my little spark. Come to mother." 

Thor blinks back sudden tears and pushes the door open. He's half expecting to see the burnt and mangled corpse again, but the room is empty.

His things are all where they had been left That Night, strewn across the floor where he hadn't had a chance to pick up the action figures he and Loki had been playing with when they'd been called downstairs. 

When Thor had been called downstairs, more accurately.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
*********

"My little spark! Come see your mother!"

Thor looks up at Loki, heart pounding in his chest. "That's not mom," he whispers urgently. He doesn't know how he knows, but he does.

"Don’t be stupid, Thor," Loki replies, using one of his figures to knock over one of Thor's.

Thor lets him, and tries to drag the game and keep Loki interested enough, distracted enough, but his brother is clever and catches on quickly. Loki makes his last toy standing concede to Thor’s, then he gets up and brushes his knees off.

“We should go down and see what mama wants,” Loki suggests, offering Thor his hand.

“It’s not her, Loki,” Thor says again. Loki’s face becomes a little uncertain before he shakes his head, then offers his hand more insistently.

“Stop trying to scare me. I’ll come with you, okay?” The smile his little brother gives him then, trying to reassure him, trying to ease his fears, doesn’t work. “Or... or I could go down and tell her you’re asleep?”

“No!” Thor huffs, biting his lip. 

If he doesn’t go downstairs, mom... not-mom will come and fetch him, and then she might bring Loki along, too. Thor doesn’t trust this not-mom, not with himself or with his little brother, but he doesn’t want to /leave/ Loki either.

What if the Inside Out Man came back?

“Darling, I know you’re awake. I’ve got a surprise for you, my love!”

“How can dad and Hela not hear her?”

Loki shrugs, and Thor feels his brother’s own fear ramp up. Thor meets Loki’s eyes as he stands, then turns towards the bedroom door. 

“Let’s just see what she wants, then we’ll say we’re tired,” Loki mutters, grabbing onto Thor’s sleeve. “Or we can wake dad...”

Thor thinks that’s their safest bet, even if their father will scold them for it, but before they can do that, the door swings open.

It’s mom—her face and her body, her clothes, but she doesn’t /feel/ right. Loki, though, brightens when she gives him a warm smile, running into her arms when she opens them.

“My little trickster,” she purrs, lifting Loki up and against her hip. “You’re getting too heavy for me, darling. You boys are staying up past bedtime, hm?”

“We were just playing a little more,” Loki chirps, turning to look back at Thor. “Will you tuck us in now?”

“Hm,” Frigga hums, and though Loki can’t see it, Thor does. Their mother’s face and expression becoming stoic. “How about tea, and then another game before bed?”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
********

Loki comes back to himself with a jump, looking up at Hela, who’s got her hand on his arm. She looks a little concerned, and he wonders how long she’d been trying to get his attention.

“I—sorry, I was out of it. Did you say something?”

“I was just saying something about this entry here and you didn’t—you had this faraway look on your face,” Hela explains. “Are you okay?”

Loki stretches his legs out, rubbing at his eyes.

“I guess. Just tired. And confused,” he admits.

There’s nothing in the journals but the same half-formed thoughts over and over, but he hadn’t really expected to figure things out on the same day Odin had been buried. Looking out the window, Loki notices that the rain and wind have picked up. 

Unease settles in his stomach.

They haven’t ever been back here at all, after the fire, and this would make it their first night back home if they stayed. 

Loki... doesn’t like the thought of that.

“Getting bad out,” he comments, closing what he’d been flipping through before his little spacing-out. “We should get going.”

“Probably. Listen, Loki,” Hela starts then. “Are you... do you really want to... I don’t even know what the old man was gunning for... we could just go back to our lives. We don’t have to stick around for this, Thor was right about that much, at least.”

“I know,” Loki mumbles, “I want to, though.”

“But /why/?”

“I owe it to mom and dad.”

Hela leans away, arms crossed as she observers him. Loki tries not to squirm under the scrutiny. 

“How? In what way?”

Loki, after the stress from the day—no, stress from the last couple of /months/—after the stress of having to deal with /Thor/ again, after that weird blanking out that’s left an uneasy feeling that he’d just relived something, buckles. Besides, Hela is bound to find out sooner or later anyways, and Thor too.

So he tells her.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**********

"Hey, why don't you look like me or Hela?" Loki asks Thor at breakfast. 

Thor looks up from his cereal. "Because you're both adopted," he replies without missing a beat. "I'm the only one who belongs here."

"Thor!" Frigga scolds from where she's standing at the stove. "I never want to hear those words out of your mouth again!" Even to Loki's young ears, she sounds strained and upset.

"I was just /joking/," Thor pouts, crossing his arms over his chest and slumping down in his chair.

"You shouldn't joke about things like that, darling," Frigga replies, and returns to her cooking. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
************

Hela sits beside Loki on the overstuffed leather sofa before the fire, both his hands clasped in hers. She had never even suspected that either of her brothers wasn't her biological kin. She and Thor had both been young enough that neither of them would remember whether Loki had been adopted, anyway.

More secrets. More lies. More trauma. She vacillates harshly and squeezes Loki's hands. At the very least, she'll get another best seller out of all of this. 

"I should go find Thor," Loki sighs after a while, standing and brushing off his trousers. "We should head out."

Hela nods, and they leave the sitting room into the foyer, where Heimdall is shaking himself off. "The driveway is blocked, wind knocked one of the trees across. I'll have to get someone here in the morning."

Hela scowls. Being here for the bare necessities is one thing, having to spend the night is another thing altogether. 

"Are you sure we can't get around it?" Loki presses. 

"Wha's the noise?" Thor asks, ambling into the foyer from Odin's study. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
***********

"What's that noise?" Thor asks Frigga as she leads him through the house. 

The tapping and the knocking are being replaced by other noises. Shrieks and the squeak of things dragging across the floor. 

He tries to wiggle his wrist out of Frigga's - not-Frigga's - grasp. "Mom, you're /hurting/ me!"

“Nonsense,” Frigga says, voice and face devoid of any inflection. “You’re fine, my love.”

The endearment sounds wrong, coming from this... thing, and even if he can’t feel the malice—the /hunger/ that’s pouring into him from her, Thor knows he would’ve still sensed it from a mile away. The woman dragging him along now is acting nothing like mama, and Thor looks up at Loki, still being carried against her hip, and wonders how he’s just sitting there.

There’s something /wrong/ with Loki too.

They get to the kitchen, and there’s some tea and little cookies laid out, almost like they’re having an afternoon snack. Except it doesn’t feel right.

“Sit,” Frigga commands, thumbing Loki’s cheek tauntingly. A warning. “A little tea party for my little spark and trickster. Will you be a good boy and pour for us, darling?”

“N-no. No!”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Now  
******

“No. Nonononono—“ Thor mumbles, heading towards the main door and flinching away from Heimdall. 

They’re trying to stop him—trying to trap him. 

He can’t stay here.

He /can’t/. 

Surely it’s as simple as going around a fucking tree, isn’t it? And hell, if they really can’t take the car, well, Thor has fucking legs. He can fucking walk!

“Thor... it’s just for-“

“No!” Thor yells, wrenching himself away from Heimdall and pressing his backing against the door, eyes darting around and trying to look for an escape. He can ram through the window if they won’t let him go through the front door—that’d be fine. As long as he doesn’t fucking stay the night. “M’leavin. I’m—lemme leave. Can’t. Won’t. Not stayin’ here.”

“You’re being dramatic, little brother. Stop it.”

“You don’ understand. You—I just—I /can’t/.”

He doesn’t have enough. Not nearly enough to get through the night here un-sober, and even if he /did/ have all his shit, Thor would still rather leave. 

The house wakes up completely at night, in the dark, in the shadows. They don’t understand that.

And when the house wakes up...

So does everything else.

"Please," he begs, tears streaming down his cheeks, burning him like flaming gasoline. "Please, no." He can't be here when the house wakes up. He can't.

If he does, it will finish consuming him.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
***********

"Hey! What's this door?" Thor stands in front of the door at the end of the hallway he is certain wasn't there before. 

Loki comes up beside him and looks at the door too. "Maybe there's something cool behind it," he says. 

Thor doesn't know if he believes that. Maybe this door has been here this whole time and he just never noticed and surely there isn't anything in there worth looking at...

Anything to turn around and go play elsewhere. Except... except... his feet are moving and his hand is reaching out for the ornate knob. 

The room is empty but for boxes, though Thor feels a cold breeze rush by him when the door opens. He shivers, closes the door again—

And yelps as the knob is suddenly hot enough to scorch his fingers. "Ow!" he cries.

"You faker," Loki laughs, running down the hall away from him. 

Thor shakes his hand, and his head, and follows.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**********

"If you're looking for the good meds, they're probably in the master bathroom," Hela comments, leaning her hip against the bathroom door frame as she watches her brother digging through the medicine cabinet. 

"I'm not—I wasn't—" Thor tries to stammer out an excuse, an explanation, but Hela rolls her eyes. She's heard it all. If the worst Thor does is steal a dead man's medication, she'll consider this whole thing a sort of win. 

"I'm taking a bath, go look somewhere else for your fix," she demands.

Thor thins his lips, but gets to his feet anyways. He stops right beside her, facing her with his mouth flopping open and shut, but he doesn’t say anything else before scurrying off. Hela closes the door with a sigh.

Hela, despite the anger, knows deep down that she loves her brothers.

Even Thor, with his appalling addictions and frustrating delusions, will always occupy a part of her heart despite their history. She still holds precious memories of their childhood, before everything, and she still cares enough about him that it makes being in his presence that much harder—especially when he’s drugged up to his eyeballs and soaking in liquor. 

She’d watched him self-destruct for /years/, and the fact that he’s still doing it now...

Hela shakes her head, slipping out of her clothes and letting the bath fill up, glad that the heating for the water still works. She needs to wash today away—the reading of the will, the service, the fucking burial... the shocking reveal about Loki’s adoption.

It works a little as Hela sits in nearly scalding water, leaning her head back into it and feeling her hair billow around her head. The heat helps her not think—helps keep her mind blank, and she stays there until her fingertips wrinkle and the water turns tepid, and only then does she get out. 

She’s almost completely relaxed, and goes to the sink, mindlessly swiping at the condensation that’s clung to mirror. Hela looks at her reflection, and a scream nearly rips itself from her mouth as she sees the figure behind her.

Hela whirls around, the cry just waiting to be released, but the bathroom is empty. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
********

Hela loves taking long baths right before she goes to bed in the evening. Partly because it drives both Thor and Loki insane if she gets into the bathroom first, but mostly it’s because she gets to soak in the tub.

Their old house didn’t have a tub, just a boring shower that sometimes didn’t even have enough hot water for all of them. 

Not here, though. Here, Hela is like a princess, and as she gets into the tub and lets herself be submerged in the warm embrace of the water, she finds herself wishing that they’ll never move again.

She loves this, the decadence of it—a word she had recently learned and was doing her best to use as much as possible. No brothers to bother her, nothing to worry about.

She turns her head when she hears a chair being dragged beside the tub.

"Oh, hello, are you here to tell me another story? I'm sorry you still don't have a mouth, but you can tell me in my head again, okay?" 

The faceless figure in the chair nods.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
************

The Inside Out Man is in every mirror Thor passes, which makes it hard to dig through mirrored medicine cabinets in bathrooms with reflective surfaces.

He can all but feel the hot breath of the creature on the back of his neck.

"Leave me alone," he pleads, frantically searching through a box filled with discarded prescription bottles for something—anything— anything at all. 

There’s a tap-tap-tap on the mirror with spindly fingers. 

"Leave me alone!" Thor cries out, finally—/finally/ putting his hands on something that would help.

It's old. It's extremely old. It has Loki's name on it, the label faded almost blank with age. But he can see what it is, and he remembers what its from. 

"Thanks, Loki," he mutters, and pops the remaining three pills of morphine into his mouth, washing them down with a swig of the rapidly-emptying brandy bottle. 

That should help, for a while at least.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**********

"Loki! Loki! What are you doing?" 

Thor looks up at the balcony Loki is currently perched on, looking out over the estate. He looks normal, but he doesn't /feel/ normal. There's something wrong.

Before he can figure out /what/ is wrong, Loki plummets off the balcony and into the bushes below.

Thor runs, screaming his brother’s name. 

Mom and dad come running too, and Hela’s face pops over the balcony before she’s shrieking as well. Mom grabs hold of Thor before he can get any closer, and dad disappears, the foliage blocking Thor’s view.

When he comes back up, he’s cradling Loki against his chest, and the right side of his brother’s head is bloody. 

All Thor can see is that his little brother isn’t moving before dad takes him to the car and speeds away.

They don’t come back until two days have passed, and Loki comes back with hazy, unfocused eyes, bruises all over, his arms, his neck... Thor knows his back and chest must be littered with them too.

His little brother’s leg is covered in a cast. 

Thor cries, but it’s mostly because of relief. His brother is here, and he’s alright—feels alright, though a little confused.

He never leaves Loki alone ever again after that. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
********

Loki huffs as he peeks into another room and finds it empty, wondering which one his brother has sequestered himself away in. 

He’s not stupid, and he isn’t cruel. Loki knows how traumatic this must be for his older brother, and he doesn’t have the heart to just leave Thor to his own devices, even if the man is going to be piss poor company.

If he’s honest, it’s also partly because Loki doesn’t want to be alone in the house either.

Not when it’s dark. 

He hasn’t just magically forgotten all the things that had happened here—things that he never had any explanations to. The many, many missing gaps in his memory that Loki can’t attribute to simply just forgetting. 

After all, how do you simply just forget your own mother poisoning you?

Or at least, that’s what Thor swears had happened that night.

Try as he might, the only memories Loki has of that night is getting carried out of the house by his father. Him over one arm, Hela over the other.

All he remembers is seeing the fire they leave behind, and the loud wailing of the fire trucks when they finally pull up. 

All he remembers is seeing one of the firefighters carrying Thor past the main door what feels like hours and hours and hours later, limp and lifeless, as thick black smoke continued to billow out, then watching them desperately try to bring his brother back to life, all of them looking grim and hopeless, while he and Hela looked on.

All he remembers is... is Thor’s ghost getting dragged—sucked back inside, almost gone—until one of the people working on his brother’s body exclaimed that Thor had a pulse. 

Loki shakes his head. 

He doesn’t want to remember that—doesn’t want to remember how close he’d gotten to losing his brother that night too.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - 

THEN  
*********

Loki comes back to himself and wonders where he is.

He knows he’d gone to sleep last night, but he doesn’t remember getting up. Loki especially doesn’t remember taking a stroll out in his pajamas, and doesn’t remember why he’d come /here/ of all places.

“Loki!” He hears his brother yell, and turns around to see the blonde running towards him, his face frantic. “Lo! Hey, are you okay?”

Loki blinks owlishly, then looks down at himself. 

He doesn’t feel like he’s hurt, but he’s more than a little confused, and now that he knows where they are, he starts feeling scared. Thor takes his hand, and Loki looks up at his older brother, feeling the heat of tears in his eyes. 

“Hey, no. Don’t cry, Lo, it’s okay. Don’t be afraid,” Thor tells him, pulling Loki in for a hug. “I’m here, okay? Nothing can hurt you. Come on, let’s go back inside before mom and dad sees.”

Loki nods, bewildered, and hugs Thor back, still trying to make sense of what is happening.

He lets Thor take his hand and lead him back into the house.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
*********

Loki blinks and shakes his head, realizing his feet have brought him to the master bedroom without him even realizing it. 

The episodes are getting closer and closer together, he realizes, and he also realizes that it only started happening like that after he'd gotten the news about Odin.

Hela would call them absence seizures. She would chalk it up to stress, and tell him he needs more sleep, and to see a neurologist. 

Loki knows better. He doesn't agree with Thor about everything that has happened in this house, but he agrees that he's not epileptic. 

He pushes the door open with a squeak of underused hinges, finding Thor laid out width-wise on Odin and Frigga's canopy bed, rocking the empty bottle of brandy back and forth on the mattress beside him.

Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**********

Back and forth. Back and forth. 

Loki tries not to get distracted by the windshield wipers slip-slapping back and forth on the windshield, trying to cut through the heavy downpour.

Behind him, Hela is grumbling that none of them should have to drop everything "just because Thor fucked up again," but her husband in the passenger seat just makes comforting noises while Loki tries to clear his vision enough to drive properly.

He should have known.

He should have known leaving Thor to his own devices in the wake of Jane’s departure and his own… airing of grievances… against his brother had been a bad idea. He should have known something would happen, that Thor would take his usual recklessness to its inevitable conclusion. He should have /done something/ instead of staying behind in Fandral’s apartment doing lines of Molly.

And now Thor might be dead and..... He sees the oncoming headlights too late to swerve back into his own lane.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
********

Thor feels the mattress dip beside him, and counts to five in his head, repeating it over and over. He’s vaguely aware that his mouth has started to move to form the shapes he’d need to make to say them, and even less aware when he’s finally saying them out loud.

Beside him, the presence lets out a snort, and Thor relaxes.

It’s just Loki, then.

“You still do that?” His little brother asks. “I forgot about that little mantra of yours.”

Thor realizes that their elbows are knocking each other every now and again, and so are their knees. The feel of his brother so near is comforting, always welcome in ways nothing else usually is, even if Loki’s ire isn’t. 

“Are you okay?”

This time, it’s Thor’s turn to snort. He turns his head to look at Loki, watching his little brother stare at the canopy blankly. It’s not hard to tell Loki’s also having a hard time being here—the obvious strain on his brother makes Thor wish he had more morphine to offer up... makes him want to invite Loki to raid more of their late father’s study for booze.

“M’okay now,” Thor mumbles when Loki turns to look at him oddly. “You okay?”

Loki sighs.

“I will be.”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

THEN  
********

Thor hovers around Loki with his hands halfway up, ready to grab onto his brother at any sign of something off. Loki sniffles as they shuffle downstairs towards the kitchen, where Thor has his brother sit while he goes to fetch the younger boy’s favorite mug.

Wordlessly, Thor pours Loki some milk, setting it down in front of his brother despite the blank stare.

Loki is there, Thor knows, but his presence feels... distorted.

“Lo?”

The other boy just keeps staring.

“Loki?”

Loki lifts his gaze, blinking slowly, then reaches for his drink, taking a sip. When he’s done with it, there’s a smile on his face, and to Thor, he feels more... present. 

“Are you okay?”

“I will be.”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**********

Hela debates on whether she should call her therapist or not. 

She’s sure that if the man were there, he’d highly recommend that she do it, after the week she’s had, but Hela is also sure that it won’t be the /right/ thing to do. The feeling in her gut tells her that it isn’t the right thing to do, and she’s always trusted her instincts.

Still, Hela is shaken.

It was something she hasn't seen in over two decades, something she had shoved so deep down inside herself that she had forgotten it altogether.

Her friend. 

Her secret friend.

Her /imaginary/ friend.

It was perfectly normal for little girls to have imaginary friends, especially when they were the only little girls in a huge manor house.

But that blank, faceless creature standing behind her in the mirror... that wasn't... it couldn't be... it was just memories and stress, that's all. Thor's claims that everyone who stays in the house for any length of time gets attacked by it is simply her brother's mental illness manifesting. 

That's all any of this is.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
*********

"So he'll get the clozapine and wellbutrin in the mornings, then the seroquel and trazodone at night?" Heimdall asks at the check out desk one last time, one hand on Thor's shoulder to keep him from wandering.

"That's right, and the instructions are on the bottles and discharge information," the nurse replies kindly, then turns her attention to Thor. "I know it can be scary to go home after you've been here a while, but you're very brave, and you'll be just fine."

Thor twitches just the slightest bit at that, the breakthrough Haldol injection they'd given him for the long ride home making him little more than a zombie.

Maybe Thor needed more time, but Heimdall couldn't stand the idea of a frightened child in a psychiatric ward anymore. So, he had checked Thor out and brought him home. 

Once Thor is back, Hela will tell anyone who will listen about how all her brother's stories are lies because he's sick in the head—sent away to the nut house and everything! 

The medication makes Thor sluggish and confused, and not there at all.

They try another combination.

And another.

And another. 

And another hospitalization following a purposeful shove of his hand through a plate-glass window, slicing his arm to ribbons and requiring two blood transfusions. 

And again and again and again. Until one day, at about sixteen, Thor refuses to play along anymore. He threatens to run away if he has to go back to the hospital, if he has to take the meds again. 

In the end, he gets what he wants. 

Thor always gets what he wants.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
********

Loki wakes up, but he doesn’t remember going to sleep. What’s more, he wakes up in the middle of a hallway, something that hasn’t happened since he’s lived here. 

“Oh, you’re back,” Thor says from behind him, and Loki jumps. “Good.”

He turns to look at his brother, who is leaning heavily against the wall, the bottle of brandy he’d been lugging around now nowhere to be seen. The man’s words register a second later.

“What do you mean?”

Thor shrugs, looking at anywhere but Loki. He’s fidgeting too, twitching nervously, curling in on himself. All signs that point to his mounting anxiety, exacerbated by what Loki knows would be withdrawal—he’s probably run out of his drug of choice already. 

Loki looks at his watch and curses. It’s only half past eight in the evening.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

THEN  
**********

Loki takes out his phone and glances at the screen. It’s only half past eight, so he shoves it back into his pocket. He refocuses on making neat lines on Fandral’s coffee table, the edge of his driver’s license already powdered white.

He leans down and presses on one nostril, snorting the powder and leaning back as the burn makes his eyes water a little. Beside him, Fandral claps his shoulder and urges him to do the rest of the lines.

Loki doesn’t know if he wants to do that.

He much prefers the weed and the oxy. Even better if it were heroin, or even just the morphine tablets, but Fan only got molly from his supplier this week. So it’s molly—and experimenting with the various ways they can take it—and booze, since Thor doesn’t exactly like sharing his stash. 

Loki doesn’t even know how Thor manages to have a stash with how much shit he takes, but well. If Thor wants to be a selfish dick, that’s alright by Loki. 

“I’ve got something else,” Fan tells him, a little secretively, even if Thor is already drooling on the couch. “You gotta promise you won’t tell your brother though. This one is just us, if you want.”

Loki eyes Fan with a bit of suspicion. The other had always been /Thor's/ friend, and Loki had just been a hanger-on. But when Thor is passed out, there's plenty of time to get to know one another. Loki actually /likes/ Fandral, he's found, outside of what he provides for them. Somebody untouched by family trauma, somebody always willing to just—hang out, play video games, to let Loki just /be/.

"Just for me, huh?" he asks, the Molly he'd snorted starting to settle warmly in his brain and body, the colors in the room brighter and kinder. Even Thor, nodding on the couch with his mouth hanging open and a needle still in his arm, looks more appealing in this light. 

Fandral nods, standing and holding out his hand for Loki to take. Loki does, and Fandral leads him into the bedroom. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**********

It's not even nine yet, and Thor is absolutely itching. He should have planned better. He should have never agreed to come, should never have said he was willing to come back here and deal with all of these repressed memories. 

Some more repressed than others, he's sure. 

Alone in Odin's study, the liquor cabinet jimmied open and the very last of his heroin cooking over a lingering funeral candle, Thor tries hard not to hear the noises in the hallway.

The swish-swish of a dress dragging along the floor. 

The scrape-scrrrraaaaaape of the Inside Out Man's fingers on the door. 

And the screaming-screaming-screaming of Frigga, and the roar of the flames.

He’s sure that all the other occupants of the house—all the other /living/ occupants—are asleep by now, or getting ready for it. Loki had gone back to his room after his little space-out, and he’s certain he’d heard Hela moving about in her own room too. Heimdall is probably in the guest bedroom, or reading a book somewhere. 

Thor doesn’t understand how any of them can stand it. 

Well, he /can/ understand why they aren’t as strung out as he is. None of them have to fucking deal with as much as Thor is dealing with, but he was hoping they’d at least be uncomfortable enough not to just say fuck it and go to bed, and hope they still see each other in the morning. That’s the thing that pisses Thor off the most.

He could still just go. He /wants/ to. But damn them, Thor can’t just leave any of them here when he knows what this house does to people—what he... /it/ will do to anyone if he leaves now. 

It’s worse this time around, too, because Thor knows it’s stronger.

It had gotten their father, finally after all these years, and it’s /stronger/—and it knows that he knows too. Thor is sure of it, if the gleeful malice permeating the air is anything to go by. It feels as though the Inside Out Man is toying with him, and it’s enjoying every minute of it too.

His salvation finally finishes cooking up, and Thor takes it eagerly, the pinch of the needle plunging into his arm a blessed relief.

At least for a little while. 

And Thor knows that it knows that too.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**********

Thor shoves Loki inside the closet, closing the doors to them and leaning against the wood. His little brother isn’t there again anyways—feels blanked out and far away, not completely there.

Thor knows that /it/ knows that, too. 

The Inside Out man.

It’s nearly three in the morning, and the house is deafening. 

He can hear the drag of fabric moving up and down the hallways, the wailing in the attic, the knocking, the creaking, the footsteps, the sound of water running somewhere. Thor can even faintly smell something being cooked up in the kitchen. 

None of those really worry him, though. It’s the sound of the scraping right at their bedroom door, more than anything, that makes Thor’s heart pound inside his chest. He’s terrified when the knob turns this way and that, and he’s shaking so hard he almost wants to go and hide in the closet with Loki too, but he can’t let the thing get to his brother.

He doesn’t know why, but he just can’t—and Thor will try everything in his power to keep the ghost from getting close.

Just as the door creaks open, though, Loki starts pounding on the wardrobe.

“Thor! Thor! Let me out!”

The bedroom door opens all the way, and Thor swallows thickly when he finds it empty, not sure whether he’s relieved or even more on edge. Still, he turns to the wardrobe and opens it up, catching Loki as he stumbles.

“It’s okay, I got you. I got you, Lo.”

“I—why was I—Thor, I don’t...”

“You were sleepwalking again,” Thor tells Loki, shutting their bedroom door before pulling his brother towards his own bed. Loki is upset, and confused, and more than a little terrified. Thor wraps his arms around his brother and hugs him close. “I’ll let you sleep here tonight, okay? Just do the trick I told you about, remember? You’re okay. You’ll be okay.”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
************

"No, we're staying the night," Loki tells the video image of his... whatever Tony is to him. Boyfriend, probably, if he had to put a real label on it. "Tree got knocked down across the drive, won't be able to get out until morning."

He rubs his eyes, and it feels like he's rubbing sandpaper into them. He doubts he'll get much sleep tonight, either. 

It's eerie, almost, the way Thor's delusions have permeated Loki's own beliefs about the house. Loki could swear he hears scraping up and down the door of his room, but that's ridiculous. 

"How's it being around the family?" Tony asks. "Any better?"

Loki shrugs, glancing up at the door. "Hela seems fine, so does Heimdall. My brother..." He shrugs again. "Same old story, I'm surprised he hasn't run off already."

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
***********

Loki stomps his foot. It's not/fair/! Thor has longer legs so he can run faster! And Thor has just run off into the woods, faster than Loki can follow him. 

"It's alright my little trickster," Frigga says from beside him, her warm gentle hand on his shoulder. "Your brother will come back in his own time."

Loki blinks. Shakes his head. "This already happened, though," he murmurs. 

"Yes," Frigga agrees. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**********

"Loki? LOKI!" 

Loki blinks, and sees Tony staring at him, looking worried. "Oh," he says softly.

He shakes his head and shifts on the bed—/his old bed/—and gives Tony a wan smile. 

“Sorry,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. “What were you saying?”

Tony stares at him through the screen, then shakes his head a little. He’s got that look on his face where he’s about to tell Loki off and offer to come get him again, offer to rescue him again.

“I could get a flight and come over, be there in less than three hours. If that’s something you want?”

“No,” he tells the man firmly. If there’s one thing Loki wants to avoid at all costs, it’s bringing Tony into this whole mess. He doesn’t want Tony anywhere near the house either, haunted or not, and he /definitely/ doesn’t want Tony to see how much of a relapse risk being near Thor really is. “It’s just... it’s been really stressful. I’m tired, and I haven’t been sleeping well. I’d really rather be anywhere else than back here.”

Tony makes a sympathetic noise, “I’d bet. When you get back, I’ll take you to Malibu.”

Loki snorts. “Malibu?”

“First place I could think of. Why? You got anywhere specific in mind?”

“I was thinking maybe out of the country. I could use some distance with the great USA. Somewhere exotic.”

“Oh wow, who are you, and what have you done to Loki?”

Loki lets out a laugh at that, but the joke also hits a nerve. He doesn’t know exactly why, but unease fills his chest, the thought of him... becoming someone else... getting taken over... Loki finds it a bit too unnerving.

“Hey,” Tony says, and Loki curses himself for getting lost in his head again. “You’d call me if you were in trouble, right? You know I’d come ASAP.”

“I know,” Loki sighs. “I’m sure I just need sleep though.”

“You want to go catch some, then?”

Loki doesn’t. Not really. But he also doesn’t want to worry Tony too much—he’s sure the other man wasn’t joking about booking a flight just to come over.

“Yeah. I’ll call you in the morning.”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
********

“Come on, buddy, I know you’ve done some jail time, and I’ve got a file full of your records saying you’ve had multiple stints in rehab too. So,” Tony Stark says, arms crossed over his chest, “let’s try this again. What are you on?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Stark.”

“You know /exactly/ what I’m talking about. And besides, don’t think I missed you at that weirdo’s party.”

Fuck. 

Loki backtracks and tries to remember if there was a time in Gast’s little get-together that he’d slipped up. He’d been out of it pretty early on, but he’s almost certain he’d never taken those stupid leather masks off. He wasn’t expecting Tony fucking Stark to accept an invitation to one of Gast’s damned orgies, but he’s sure he hadn’t slipped up.

“I /swear/, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Can I just go do my damned job now?”

“I’m also missing a couple of pretttty expensive gadgets...”

“I’m here for just a couple of hours a day, working my ass off, you’d think I have time to steal anything?”

“Loki, come on, I can practically still see the powder on your nose. So either you work with me here and talk, or I fire you and get your ass right back in jail. What’s it gonna be?”

Loki grits his teeth. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**********

Thor grits his teeth and tries not to claw at himself. He knows this isn’t the worst of it, that the withdrawal symptoms he’s feeling right now aren’t supposed to be that bad, that he can last at least until morning... but being in this house somehow has an effect on even /that/.

Its not fucking /fair/!

He had been going days, weeks, sometimes, even, without needing to shoot up. Days when just a little bit of booze and weed is all he needs to get him through. Those are good days, and he'd been having them more and more, until... 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**********

Thor is woken from a deep, deep sleep by the feeling of a rope around his neck. His eyes snap open, awake in an instant, his hands scrabbling at his throat.

There's nothing there, nothing strangling him, but he still /feels/ it, he feels it like it’s happening, he feels himself dangling, his eyes bulging, neck....

He can only see out of one eye, and he sees the foyer of the old house. 

No, no no no no NO! 

There's only one explanation. Only one, and Thor doesn't want to believe it, doesn't want to entertain the notion. 

He breaks out of it with a gasping breath and sits on the edge of his bed for a while, just trying to get his air back. 

The shiver up his spine won't quit, and with shaking hands he picks up his phone and calls Loki.

"I don't have any money for you," are the first words out of Loki's mouth. 

"It’s not that," Thor gasps. He's long stopped expecting his family to support his lifestyle. "It's dad, something's wrong with dad."

There's silence on the other end.

"I just talked to him two days ago, he's fine," Loki replies, voice tight. "Don't... don't do this again."

"Loki... please..."

"Goodnight, Thor." 

Thor lets out a closed-mouth scream and nearly throws his phone across the room, but instead he calls Hela. 

"What do you want?"

"Dad - there's something wrong with dad-" Please let Hela believe him, just this once. Just this once. 

Hela sighs into the phone. "No there isn't. There's something wrong with /you/, though. Don't call me again." 

Thor drops his head into his hand and makes one more call - this one to Val, to pick up the one thing that will take away the visions in his head. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
***********

Hela is jolted awake with a sensation that she’s falling. 

She knows that she isn’t, of course, but her body doesn’t know that, and she bolts upright, breaths heaving and heart beating like she’d just run a marathon. The room is still dark, and the shadows in the corners start to look just the slightest bit menacing, and she thinks she sees the beginnings of the faceless woman coming out of them. Hela immediately reaches for the lamp on the bedside table, the small bulb lighting the room up in a warm glow. 

Empty.

Of course it’s empty.

Hela reaches for her phone and checks the time—just barely a couple of minutes past three in the morning.

She buries her face in her hands and lets out a deep breath, cursing Thor for managing to get into her head like this. Cursing her own mind for bringing up that long forgotten memory.

Undeterred, and unwilling to be cowed, Hela gets up from bed to head downstairs. She could do with something warm to drink, and she wants to prove to herself that there’s nothing wrong with the house except for the stories that Thor made up.

It’s just a structure, nothing more.

Just a collection of wood and steel, cement and stone.

Her door lets out a creak when she opens it, but nothing jumps at her, and the darkness in the hall no longer looks so daunting. Further down, the door Loki’s room opens too. 

Hela’s chest seizes for a moment, but then her youngest brother steps out.

She scolds herself internally for being so jumpy, then walks over, arms crossed over her chest.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

Loki shakes his head, “Too wound up. Heard your door opening.”

“Yeah, body woke me up. Probably hungry,” Hela offers, tilting her head and gesturing for Loki to head downstairs. “Up for a midnight snack?”

Loki nods, and they walk silently towards the stairs, Hela feeling more at ease in her younger brother’s presence. The sense of peace she’d just been regaining gets shattered once they’re close enough to see down the main foyer, though.

Thor is sitting there on his ass on the floor, looking up at them, scrabbling are his neck.

Loki runs down the rest of the way, and Hela follows suit, managing to get there beside her brothers just as Loki kneels down. Thor’s face is one of pure terror, and before they even manage to say anything, Hela already knows. She just knows this is going to be one of /those/ incidents.

“Thor. Thor, what’s wrong?”

The blonde shakes his head, eyes still trained on the empty space, taking gasping breaths.

“I’ll go get Heimdall...” Hela sighs, turning away and letting Loki handle it.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**********

Hela stands just at the doorway to Thor’s room, arms crossed as Heimdall sits on the edge of Thor’s bed. Her brother is huddled in the corner, shaking like a leaf.

“Thor, I know you’re afraid, but it’s just a blackout. The storm must have knocked some cables loose.”

“No! No no no no no no you don’t- you don’t under-understand- he’s here. He’s here, he’s here- it- it’s here. It’s going to kill me. It’s going to take me and bring me back.”

“/Nothing/ is going to hurt you. I’m here. Your brother and sister are here, and nothing else.”

“I can /hear/ it!”

Hela feels Loki come up behind her, feels his hand grab onto the fabric of her nightdress. 

“Hear what?” Heimdall asks, but before Thor can answer, Hela does.

“Let me guess... The Inside Out man, right?” Hela glares when Thor nods his head viciously, and Loki’s grip on her dress grows tighter. “Well, you’re wrong. Nothing is here, and you should stop acting like that. You’re scaring Loki.”

“But—“

“But nothing! It’s all in your imagination because you’re brain dead!”

“Hela!” Heimdall scolds, looking over his shoulder at her, frowning in disapproval. “Go take your brother to the kitchen. Make some hot chocolate. We will talk later.”

Hela curls her hands into fists, but does as she’s told, leading Loki to the kitchen and rummaging through their cupboards. It’s quiet as she sets some water to boil, then prepares four mugs. Just as she’s about to grab some cookies, Loki pipes up.

“Is he really back? The Inside Out man?”

Hela turns to her youngest sibling and grabs hold of his shoulders—Loki, despite being a year older, has somehow managed to become thinner. Smaller.

“There is no such thing as the Inside Out man. Nothing’s here, Loki.”

“But Thor... Thor looked so scared...”

Hela bites her lip. “Thor is also sick, remember? Remember what Heimdall told us? About when... when he was rescued? His head is sick, Loki. His mind is sick. Thor doesn’t know the difference between what’s real and what isn’t anymore, and it’s up to us to help him figure it out. Can you do that?”

Loki doesn’t give her an answer before the kettle starts wailing.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
***********

Loki may not believe in the phantoms that his older brother believes in, but he hates them all the same.

He hates that they can strike fear so deeply into his brother’s heart and put the look of pure terror on his face. He hates that they can make Thor cower and shake, that they can bring him to his knees. He hates that they make life so unbearable for his brother that Thor turns to his vices just to get rid of them. But what Loki hates the most about them, though, is that he can’t fight those things off and confront them for his older brother. At least, not in the way that Thor had managed to do for him all those years ago. 

So no, Loki might not believe in everything his brother says, but Loki hates seeing Thor this way.

"Thor? Thor?" He shakes his brother's shoulder, trying to elicit a response of any kind. 

"Don’t you see him?" Thor asks in a raspy whisper, his eyes fixed on top of the grand staircase. His shaking continues. "Can't you see him?"

Loki follows Thor's gaze upwards, feeling anxiety grip his chest at the idea he /might/ see what Thor is seeing. He thinks he used to be able to see these things—

Or maybe he's just always let Thor play with his head like this. Maybe Thor has always been sick. 

But Loki knows those are just the lies he and Hela tell themselves to feel better. Thor can't lie to himself the same way, so he numbs himself to it. 

"There's nothing there, Thor," Loki replies. "What do you see?" 

A tear slips down Thor's cheek. "The future."

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
************

"I got one," Fandral says, kicking up his feet onto the table and taking a rip from the communal bong that lives on said table. "If you could see the future, would you want to?"

Tripping on acid, ketamine, Molly, and anything else they'd been able to get their hands on for the long weekend, and their discussions have delved into the philosophical more than once.

Thor, who had mostly been keeping to himself and his heroin—they had learned the very hard way that psychedelics and hallucinogens did not mix well with Thor's pre-existing delusions—speaks up. "No way," he says, moving closer to the table and the conversation. "I don't wanna know what's coming."

"But then you could, like, make your life perfect," Fandral argues. "You could make all the right choices." 

Thor gives them a sick smile. "Who says any of the choices we make are actually ours?" 

"Shut up, man, you're so weird!" Fandral throws a pillow at him, and they start talking about something else.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**********

Hela can't wait until she can get out of here.

There's too much to think about, all without some semblance of space or distance from it all. At the rate they’re going, she knows she’ll write about it, eventually. But in the meantime, she's leading Heimdall back to the foyer where Thor is probably still doing that /thing/.

Hela doesn’t know what they are, but they’re worse than Thor’s usual nonsense. 

She’s never been sure about the root of these episodes, whether they’re from the drugs, or if Thor is having a psychotic episode, or if it’s the PTSD acting up, or if it’s the brain damage. All she knows is it’s usually worse, and it usually comes with intense emotions that neither she nor Loki could handle. 

It’s the same thing now, when they get to the foyer, and Hela hears her younger brother’s harsh sobs long before she sees them. At least they aren’t on the floor anymore, though on the bottom step of the stairs isn’t exactly a step up—no puns intended.

Heimdall, patient as ever, simply walks towards the two men and calls Thor’s name. 

Thor covers his mouth with one hand, shaking his head, the other tangling in his hair, pulling compulsively. The older man reaches down to still the action, pulling back when Thor flinches away.

“You’re freezing, Thor. Your hair is a bit damp, too.”

Loki sits beside his brother and lays a hand on his back. 

“Your shirt is wet, too.”

“Did you try to leave?” Hela asks, looking towards the main entrance, then towards her brother. “You’ll catch your death out there.”

Thor sniffles. “S’too loud. I just... it’s better in the garden. Too much. I just... I came back in. It’s good. I’m all good.”

Hela lets go of the frustration. Just enough not to stay mad at her brother.

“Well... Loki and I were just heading to the kitchen to get something warm to drink. I could look through dad’s stuff to find you something dry—“

“No!” Thor yelps, then, head snapping up and looking at her pleadingly. “No, just... I don’t... I’m okay. Just need a towel or something.”

Hela scowls, but then softens. She does love her brother, and she truly doesn't like to see him suffering.

"Come on," she urges. "Let's go make some hot chocolate." 

Thor glances at Loki, then Heimdall, then Hela, then up at the landing above them, then back to Hela. He rises, unsteady, clearing his throat. "Yeah. Okay. Okay." 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
*********

Frigga drops three marshmallows on the top of Loki's snake mug filled with hot chocolate and gives him a smile. "Perfect hot chocolate for a perfect little boy," she says. 

"Hey! What about me!" Thor protests from her other side, leaning around her to stick his tongue out at Loki. 

Frigga laughs, light and lyrical. "Perfection isn't reserved for only one person, and you are both perfectly splendid." She rises to her tiptoes to kiss Loki's cheek.

Loki grins as he takes a sip of the warm drink, looking over at Thor. But wait, something's wrong. Why is he taller than Thor? Why is he taller than Frigga? Dad has said he was growing like a weed, but this is... /grown up/ size. 

"Oh," he says, realizing. "It’s happening again."

Frigga nods. "It is," she says.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
************

"- so you can forget about it!" Hela's voice is the first thing he hears when he comes back. 

"What?" he asks. "Wait, what?"

Wasn't he just—he was, wasn't he? In this kitchen with Frigga and Thor. Just now. 

No. Just stress. Just Thor getting into his head and under his skin.

“Hela, for /once/ would you please just trust me?!” Thor is yelling, and Thor... well, Thor never yells quite this loud anymore, but it’s been years since they’ve all been in the same room—

Heimdall is... where?

Loki looks around, realizes it’s just the three of them. He opens his mouth to speak, to ask where the man had gone, but Hela’s voice has already cut through the silence again.

“Believe you? You’re asking me to fucking /believe/ you right now?! When you’re telling me Loki’s the one that’s not all here? That you weren’t mucking around in the garden for those damned berries?”

“Yes!”

“Your fucking clothes are covered in their damn juice!”

“I was just—I—I was just getting some fucking air!”

Loki winces, reaching up to rub his forehead. He’s a little confused. A little lost— and where had he just been? 

/When/ had he just—

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**********

“Your brother said he’d found some interesting looking berries growing right at the edge of the trees, Hela darling. Would you mind going to check on him for me please?”

Loki looks up from where he’s sprawled, reading with Hela since he can’t run around yet, his leg being broken. Mama’s face and the tone of her voice sounds odd. 

“But dad said I need to keep an eye on—“

“I’ll sit with him, dear. Besides, Thor seemed very eager,” she says to Hela, and here, she leans down and whispers something in her ear. Loki can’t make out what it is, but he doesn’t like it. 

“Don’t keep secrets from me. It’s not nice. I’m not feeling very well.”

Hela turns back towards him with a small smile, “Just sit tight. I’ll be right back.”

Loki turns towards mama then and frowns when she comes to sit next to him, petting his hair. It just... doesn’t feel right, but he doesn’t understand why either. Maybe it’s because he’s still taking the medications that make him all loopy. 

Hela doesn’t return for a while, and when she does, it’s with dad. Odin is leading her by the arm, and Hela’s face is streaked with tears. Loki sits up, but mama pushes him to lie back down.

“Stay, my love. I’ll go see what’s happened.”

Hela sits beside Loki, still sniffling.

"What happened? What's wrong? Where's Thor?" It has to be bad, it must be for Hela to be crying and for dad to look so upset. 

Hela shakes her head.

"I don't know," she admits, and reaches out to clasp his hand.

They wait like that for what seems like forever, and Loki goes in and out of himself. He doesn't know where he goes, but it's not here. 

But he /is/ here when Odin and Frigga come back. Dad is carrying Thor, who has his legs wrapped around Odin's waist and his arms around his neck, his face buried in his father's shoulder. 

Both their parents are pale and shaken and Loki can hear Thor sobbing, inconsolable.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I don't wanna die!"

"You're not going to die," Frigga says, and Loki wishes he could leap to his feet so he could run to his brother the way Hela does. 

"Dad is going to bring Thor to the doctor," Frigga explains, voice shaking, "while you two will make dinner with me."

She scoops Loki into her arms and holds him tight to her chest as they walk back to the house, silent.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
***********

"If I have to watch you convulse and die on the floor because you tried to get high on fucking /nightshade/, I'm going to kill you myself and then /kill you again/!" Hela screams, punching Thor hard in the shoulder. How could he /do/ this to them again? /How/ does this kind of thing keep /happening/? 

The nightshade as a child.

The brain damage from That Night.

The drugs.

And the OD that led to... 

She shakes herself. It's not her job to keep her brother from self-destructing. She's tried for years, she's not doing it anymore. But she doesn't want him to die for something so... so... /sad/.

Thor is just sitting there, taking it, and Loki is having another fit. Heimdall has gone to try to contact 911 for the possibility of an air rescue, or maybe just to ask for what they need to look out for. 

“Honestly, Thor, you’re so... so /fucking stupid/!”

Thor flinches, wrapping his arms around himself, scratching at his wrists, at his neck, his arms... 

“I didn’t... I didn’t... I was just... a walk... I just needed...”

Hela grits her teeth.

She grabs hold of Thor’s face, a hand on either cheek, and forces her brother to look her in the eye. Thor’s blue ones get a telling sheen, and a couple slip down his cheeks.

“I don’t want to die... I don’t-I don’t want to die... not anymore. Please.”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
***********

“No! No! I don’t wanna die! I don’t wanna die! I don’t-“

“Thor!” Hela yells, shaking her younger brother’s shoulders as he continues to thrash on the bed. “You’re gonna wake everyone, shush!”

Thor jerks awake, almost knocking her face with his head. There are tears silently leaking from his eyes. Her concern wins out over her frustration at being startled awake by his screaming, and she lays a hand on Thor’s knee, waiting for him to calm down.

“That must’ve been one scary nightmare,” Hela comments once Thor has settled down enough. When her brother maintains his quiet, she shakes him a little. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Thor shakes his head.

“Well... whatever it was, remember, it’s just a bad dream, and bad dreams can’t hurt you.”

Thor sniffles and swipes at his eyes. 

“It felt real... it felt /so real/. I was dying, I was dying real slow, and everyone was... I was all by myself and nobody cared.”

“Well, now you /know/ it wasn’t real.”

“What? Why?”

“Well, I’m here, aren’t I? That means I care. And if I care enough to be here even if I wanna be sleeping real badly instead means that your dream can’t be true.”

Thor looks like he doesn’t follow, but Hela doesn’t really need him to. She doesn’t even remember half of the things she’d just said—the effect is what she was after.

Thor laughs a little wetly, “You’re so weird.”

Hela shoves him hard until his head falls back into the pillow, and pulls the blankets back over and tucks her brother in like how she’d seen mama do for all of them. She hesitates before leaning down and giving her brother a hug.

“You’re not gonna die. Not for a really, really, really long time, anyways. Go back to sleep, okay?”

“Okay... thanks, Hela.”

“You’re welcome.”

\------------‐  
NOW  
**********

".... aid that we should monitor him but if he hasn't..."

"....probably didn't ingest any..."

"...going to die, Thor. It's okay, you don't ha..."

Loki blinks as he finally, finally returns to the present moment. He doesn't know where he'd gone, but he knows he had, because there's a blank. 

Just like the other blanks in his memories. Just like the blanks of That Night. The blank of the Inside Out Man, until Thor had dredged all of it up again. 

"Are you alright, Loki?" Heimdall is asking him.

Loki manages to turn his head towards the man, and nods. "I will be," he murmurs. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
*********

"What did they do at the hospital?" Loki asks once Thor is home again, almost a week later. He looks paler than Loki thinks a person could possibly look, and this is the first time he hasn't been asleep since dad carried him in from the car this morning. 

Thor fidgets with the bracelet still wrapped around his wrist. "I dunno. I wasn't really there, I don't think." 

"Yeah you were, mom said," Loki protests. Of course Frigga wouldn't lie about something that important! 

Thor shakes his head. "I knew you wouldn't understand," he huffs. 

"But I do understand," Loki says, sitting beside Thor and putting a hand on his shoulder.

"Not yet you don't," says Thor. "This happened just before all that started." 

"Oh," Loki says, blinking. "I'm back here again." 

Thor nods, his small face solemn and serious. "It will keep you safe from now on. From this moment on. I'll keep you safe, brother. I've kept you safe, haven't I?"

"You tried," Loki murmurs.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
***********

"So there's good news and bad news," Heimdall says, hours later, once morning breaks behind a thick cover of clouds and torrential rain. 

The weather outside looks how Thor feels. He's hungover, for one thing, and the two shots of scotch he'd poured in his coffee aren't doing jack shit about that this morning. For another thing, he isn't really interested in any more /bad news/.

"Bad news first," Hela requests, brow arched. 

Heimdall laces his fingers together.

"There's a hurricane making landfall just east of here. We're getting hit with the outskirts. They've, uh, issued a shelter in place order. All flights out are canceled."

Thor breathes through a bout of nausea, because that means... that means…

"We have to stay here even /longer/?" 

"I'm sure dad had plenty of meds you can pilfer without resorting to literal poison," Hela snaps at him.

Thor feels his ears start ringing, the voices slurring around him and distorting, the walls closing in on him in all directions. He thinks it would be better if he really did just poison himself now and get things over with.

He doesn’t even realize he’s moving until he’s at the front steps of the house, and Thor just lets himself collapse there.

This is insane.

It’s insane, right?

It has to be.

Maybe Thor really is fucked up in the head, and this is all just him having a really long goddamn episode.

Maybe he’d died that time he’d actually eaten those goddamned poison berries when he was younger.

Or maybe he’s actually dead—still trapped in a fucking coma, never really having woken up.

Maybe he’d died that time when he overdosed.

What are the fucking odds of this happening? A hurricane warning just happens to come in right when they’re set to fucking leave? What are the goddamn odds?

“Thor...”

“Please just tell me I can go bunker down in a motel somewhere.”

Loki sighs from behind him before his younger brother joins him on the steps. Thor can feel the anxiety radiating from his brother too, and he sort of wishes he can shut it down—it wouldn’t be the first time he’s wished it.

This is just his worst fucking nightmare coming true.

“I think all establishments are closing down, sorry... I really am,” Loki sighs. Sincere. “You didn’t stay to hear the good news.”

Thor snorts.

“We’re trapped. There is no good news.”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
*********

“Okay, so the good news is, besides the retrograde amnesia, everything seems to be in order,” the doctor tells them, but Thor isn’t really listening. “There are a few areas in the scan where his brain activity is slightly lower than average, but—“

Thor looks out the window, tuning out the droll of his neurologist’s voice. He wants to go back home—go back to Heimdall’s house and curl up in bed. He doesn’t like being away from his siblings—being away from Loki, especially.

He feels like he needs to protect his brother, still, though he isn’t sure from what. Thor just knows he needs to be with his brother to keep Loki safe.

Something deep down inside him tells him, someday Loki might be in danger, and Thor needs to be there to protect him. He just knows it like he knows his name. 

He doesn't really know what's going to happen from here. They're going to live with Heimdall, he knows that, but everything else seems far away, like he had heard it once in a dream, or a half-forgotten memory. 

"Are you ready to come home?" Heimdall asks, holding out his hand. "We'll stop for ice cream on the way." 

Thor manages a smile at that. "Ice cream is good," he says.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
************

"Here, I found this in the freezer." Loki sits down in front of Odin's desk and pushes a carton of ice cream and a spoon across to Thor, who is diligently working his way through Odin's liquor, despite Hela's protests on the matter. Alphabetically, it seems like, by the meticulous way the bottles are arranged on the desk. 

"Thanks," Thor says softly, tugging the carton and spoon towards himself. "Oh, this is that fudge ripple you always liked. Here—"

Thor scoops up a spoonful and holds it out for Loki to taste. 

In that moment, Loki feels whole. Like he and Thor have had all their pieces put back together and this is how things always could have been.

Just this easy, happy, moment. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
*********

"You'll always be my big brother, right, Thor?" Loki asks, curling up beside Thor as they both try to ignore the tapping that's been going on at the door for about an hour now. 

Thor ruffles Loki's hair. "Of course, dummy, you're my favorite person in the whole universe. I'll keep you safe forever."

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**********

Thor tries to ration the supply of booze he’d managed to pilfer from dad’s study and from around the house. He really does. After all, who knows how long they’re going to be stuck here for. He knows he’s not likely going to be allowed to leave, and even if Thor has entertained the idea of leaving anyways, he won’t abandon his family here.

Not when everything is the way it is—all distorted and terrifying.

He won’t leave. Not even when Hela chews him out every time they cross paths, or even if he can feel Loki’s frustration from three rooms away, or when he can feel how mentally and physically exhausted Heimdall is.

He wishes he could do something more than just stay here and be a headache, a heartache, and an overall burden, but... but he doesn’t know anything else. 

When you’re told that—even if indirectly, or offhandedly—every day for years and years and years... well, you sort of shift and change yourself to fit the mold. 

Tap.

Tap.

Scrape.

Thor closes his eyes, though his entire body goes rigid. 

It’s too early.

It’s too fucking early, and the sun is up—it’s still bright out.

It’s /too early/.

But it isn’t really though, is it? Ghosts don’t follow and adhere to the schedules of the living.

/Especially/ this one.

/This/ one delights in the torment it brings, the absolute terror that climbs up Thor's throat at even the /thought/ of it. That horrible, skinless grin, that burden of... 

Something.

He's missing something here. It feels like it, anyway, but he isn't sure exactly what it is. It's probably just the booze and the withdrawal. 

That's all it ever is. 

And that would comfort him, if, behind him in the mirror, the Inside Out Man didn't watch him sip his drink. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**********

"An-ano-another!" Thor manages to exclaim, half rising from the couch and waving his red plastic cup at Fandral. 

Fandral, who currently has his mouth suctioned onto Loki's neck.

"It's on the table, get it yourself," Loki moans as Fandral slips a hand down his pants.

Thor is too out of it on whatever the hell he'd taken to even notice. 

Or, Loki had thought he was.

"What're you guys - wha're y'guys doin'?" Thor asks, propping himself up on the coffee table by his elbows. 

Loki breaks away from Fandral—because the last thing he wants is Thor to get all bent out of shape because Loki wants to have a /normal/ life for once—and walks over to Thor, pouring straight whiskey into his cup, topping it with the slightest hint of cola.

"Here, happy? Drink up." 

The sooner Thor passes out, the better, really.

His brother’s hand reaches out and grabs hold of his arm in a motion that makes him doubt Thor is as wasted as he’d thought. Loki yanks his arm back and glares daggers at him, burying the guilt he feels when Thor’s smile dims slightly. 

He doesn’t believe in the bullshit Thor yaps about, not anymore, but why’d his brother have to be so fucking /weird/? 

“What?” He growls, trying to shake off the feeling that he’d just done something wrong. Thor just keeps staring. “Jesus, /what/? My mix not to your tastes? Do I need to go grab you some ice?”

Thor lifts the cup to his lips and downs its contents in one long pull before grabbing for the bottle Loki had left on the coffee table. He raises it in a salute, then turns away from them and drinks straight from the bottle. 

“Take it easy, Thor, damn… I don’t wanna have to call 911 again,” Fandral grumbles.

Thor lets out a laugh, and to Loki’s ears, it sounds a bit resentful.

“Sure,” his brother snorts, “don’t worry. I got, got lotsa pras—pracs—pracsticks—fuckiit, y’know wadd’I mean.”

Loki rolls his eyes, grabbing Fandral by the wrist. He’ll let Thor bask in his liquor—the asshole probably won’t remember it anyways. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
*********

Loki, try as he might to recall some memories and fit pieces in his head together, just can’t seem to remember anyways. 

Now that he’s truly thinking about it, about why Thor is so adamantly averse to staying in the house, he comes up short. Loki just always comes back to the same three reasons—the fire that killed mom, the Inside Out Man, and the other weird stuff that Thor claims had happened.

Weird stuff that Loki is just now realizing he... doesn’t actually really remember experiencing through his own perspective. It’s always Thor’s perspective he imagines in his head. The thing is, though, he knows he should remember them too—but the memories are just... out of reach, somehow. 

None of the answers are in the nonsense in Odin’s journals.

If the old man hadn’t called to reveal to him his heritage, and if Loki hadn’t seen the adoption records himself, he would have easily believed he’d inherited his late father’s madness.

Looking through the journals, though, Loki is starting to think that maybe Thor... Well, something had obviously been wrong with mom for her to do what she did. Something was clearly wrong with dad. None of the dates in his journals line up with any of the events he writes about, and some things he has written aren’t anything Loki could ever hope to quantify. 

It's not a leap to suspect Thor has inherited it.

It's not the house, Loki has decided. It's not the house, it's what the house represents to his brother, making him so unwilling to be here. 

Thor's madness, manifesting itself yet again, now dragging Loki into his orbit once more. Stuck in the gravity well of misery and stubbornness that is Thor Odinson. 

It hadn't used to be like that. Thor always used to protect him, and then... well. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
*************

"I know I look scary, but I promise I won't hurt you."

Loki blinks wide, terrified eyes at the creature he is trapped in the bathroom with. He's trembling, unable to move as a lipless mouth makes noises that sound like words. 

"I'm sorry I'm scaring you. I'll—"

Loki blinks and the bathroom is empty again, except for him. He shakes his head, the encounter already forgotten, and decides to ask Thor if he wants to go play in the garden.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
***************

Thor enjoys being in the garden. It’s bright, and fresh, and open—outside of the confines of the house. It’s also one of the only places that Thor has any good memories of, minus that one where he had essentially poisoned himself with nightshade. 

Hela will probably hate the fact that he’s sitting out here again, in the pouring rain, but Thor doesn’t much care about what Hela thinks right now. Being inside the house itself for too long, and being inside with his two siblings /and/ Heimdall, feels like being constantly pulled apart in every direction.

The ghosts picking apart his sanity, his siblings—even if it’s unknowingly or unintentionally—joining in on the fray. And the memories... well, those are a different kind of ghost themselves.

He can almost see their mother continuing to dig up some holes for the rose bush she never really got around to nurturing. He can almost see the three of them—can almost /hear/ the three of them shrieking in delight as dad aims the garden hose at them.

The image of their family, so happy and perfect, makes Thor pull the bottle of gin to his lips. 

He wants to preserve the memory forever, but at the same time, he wants to get rid of it, too. 

They’ll only ever exist in his head anymore. 

“Hey...” Loki says from behind him.

Thor grunts—just his luck, for Loki to come looking when he’s finally found a small sense of peace.

“It’s awful out here. Come back inside. Hela and Heimdall are making the house special.”

Thor grunts again.

“In a bit.”

He hears Loki come up behind him, feels Loki's hand on his shoulder. "Please come inside, Thor," he asks, sincerity Thor isn't used to hearing from him in his tone. "It’s time for dinner."

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**********

"Come on, it’s time for dinner!" Heimdall calls up the stairs. "House special!"

Only one set of feet comes down the stairs; Hela. "Where are your brothers?" Heimdall asks.

Hela shrugs. "I think they're staying at a friend's house tonight or something? Want me to text Loki?" 

Not Thor, because Thor cannot be expected to act rationally, to be responsible. Loki can do that for both of them. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**********

Hela raises an eyebrow when Loki returns from the garden with Thor in tow. "Can we eat in the dining room?" Thor mumbles around his latest drink. "I'd rather not eat in the kitchen now if... if that's okay." 

Always this shit about not eating in the kitchen. Even as a kid, Thor /hated/ eating in Heimdall's kitchen. Hela figures it has to do with what happened in this one, and he's not being as obnoxious about it as he sometimes has been, so that's something at least. Maybe he's finally drunk enough to just sit there and be quiet if they do that one thing and sit in the dining room. 

She doesn't want to start another fight with her brothers today. It's getting old, and the longer they're stuck here, the worse it will get. Thor will run out of booze. Loki will run out of cigarettes. She'll run out of the small number of antidepressants and Xanax she'd brought on what she assumed would only be a one-night affair. 

In other words, the longer they're stuck here, the closer they get to becoming exactly what Thor had proclaimed them: a time bomb.

They can still walk around that inevitable explosion, at least for now, and Hela isn’t against giving in to some reasonable concessions. She says nothing as they all shuffle towards the dedicated dining hall.

She can’t remember the last time she had eaten here, since they had always taken their meals at the table in the kitchen. Mom used to say that the warmth in there from the cooking is what makes the meals more delicious, but Hela honestly can’t say she notices the difference as they tuck into their food. 

Loki blanks out more than once, making him take a while before he even finishes half his serving, and Thor is more interested in drinking, only the occasional bite of food landing in his mouth. Heimdall is doing his best to try to engage them in conversation, but the older man has always been awkward when it came to making idle small talk.

Hela resists a sigh, just focusing on getting through this pretense of normalcy. 

She’s never felt more lonely.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
***********

“Why don’t you try offering this one to your publisher?”

Hela snorts at the suggestion, narrowing her eyes at Heimdall.

“It’s a personal thing. I don’t want to put our story out there like some freak show display.”

The older man is staring at her, and even when Hela shifts her own gaze away, she can feel his eyes still trying to drill holes into her skull. Trying to peek inside her head. It's an unnerving sensation. 

“But that's the thing, isn’t it? What you’ve written here tells people the real story, according to your perspective. It tells your truth.”

“My truth, huh? What truth is that?”

“That what you’ve been through, all of you, is a tragedy, and that you don’t appreciate the conclusions other people come up with,” Heimdall says reasonably, then more quietly, he adds, “that you’re lonely.”

Hela scowls. 

“You’re wrong.”

"Hmm," Heimdall says, but doesn't push. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
***********

Loki is sure he was standing in the garden just a moment ago, can still feel the dirt under his fingers, but when he blinks again, he's inside the house, sitting in front of a roaring fire, mug of hot chocolate beside him and Thor slouched in the chair across from him.

"Welcome back," Thor slurs, and Loki wonders just how many of dad's old bottles Thor has put away since they've been here so far. 

It's a selfish wish, but Loki hopes they get to leave soon. The longer he stays here, the more he feels... unsettled. Caught in memories he can't quite pin down, more a vague sense of unease. 

And the episodes.

He's not enjoying those one bit. 

"How long?" Loki asks, tucking his legs up under himself in the chair he'd somehow gotten into. 

Thor shrugs. "I dunno, a minute or two, didn't know you wanted me t'time 'em." He giggles and tilts his head against the high back of the chair. "I don't think I can count anymore."

"Yeah, I doubt it," Loki grunts in reply. He's still disoriented, and Thor doesn't seem to be in any immediate danger, so he lapses into silence, the only noise the crackling of the fire and Thor occasionally clearing his throat or shifting slightly in the chair, then, eventually, snoring. 

Well, at least /somebody/ is getting some sleep.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
***********

"You look exhausted!" 

Thor chuckles and grins, picks Jane up and spins her around, holds her tight to him.

"I'm not," he promises, still grinning, because he'd snorted some coke just before leaving Fan's for here.

Not a lot, just enough to keep from falling asleep stargazing. He falls asleep in the strangest places sometimes. Not like Loki used to, back when they were kids and he sleep walked, and Thor knows /why/ he's not always certain where he is when he wakes up.

He bets Jane never blacks out.

He bets she drinks single glasses of white wine and has never touched anything stronger than Aspirin. He bets if she knew about half of the shit he had to do to be even sort of capable of dating her and acting like a normal fucking person, she would leave him instantly. 

When he touches her with bare skin, all he feels is pleasant warmth. 

He'll lose Loki soon. He knows it. Hela won't be far behind, and then he'll be alone. He needs to hang onto Jane. 

He has to.

It’s unfair of him, selfish, even, but Thor knows that without her as a lifeline, he’s going to end up drowning—he’s barely keeping himself afloat even now.

Jane pulls away first, holding him at arm’s length, and the feeling of her concern for him—just feeling the /sincere/ care and love she has for him—it’s like discovering an oasis after walking through Death Valley. Thor gives her a smile, leans down and presses his forehead against hers.

He knows he doesn’t deserve her—and he knows they won’t last. How they’d even managed to get to this point is beyond his understanding, but he’ll bask in it for a while longer.

Just a little while longer. 

“Are you sure you’re okay, Thor?”

“Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah—sure, I’m okay. Let’s go grab some blankets.”

He can try, for her.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
*************

When Hela finds her Xanax bottle missing, she knows immediately where to look—or rather, who to look for.

She’s so far beyond furious that she isn’t even aware of the string of curses that comes from her lips. So overtaken by the emotion that she doesn’t even realize she’s checking the dollhouse to find where her brothers are—she’d long since concluded that her ‘memories’ of finding her family through the thing were all part of Thor’s delusions too. 

Shared psychosis.

That’s all everything that had happened was. Shared psychosis between Thor, Loki, their mom, and she admits maybe even herself at some point in their childhood. What Odin himself fell into trying to stay here to find the ‘truth’ when he should’ve gone to seek therapy instead.

Shared psychosis...

Just like how she finds Thor also /sharing/ her fucking meds with Loki in the sitting room.

"You lying, thieving, psychotic little SHITSTAIN!" she yells, storming up to Thor where he's been huddled with Loki, their heads together like they're sharing a secret.

Well, they are, but it's not the kind of secrets little boys should be putting their heads together and giggling over. 

"Somebody's mad, whomp whomp," Thor snickers, but Loki's head snaps up and the look in his eyes is of guilt, and shame. 

Thor doesn't look like he cares even the slightest. She storms over, snatches her pill bottle from them and grabs Thor by his shaggy blond hair, all but dragging him away from the fireplace and into the open area of the room where she can /really/ lay into him. 

Thor looks up at her in surprise, one hand reaching up to try and relieve some of the pressure she's putting on his scalp. Hela credits all her years of jiu jitsu and self defense classes with what she does next.

When she releases Thor's hair and he goes to stand, to fight back as best he can in the state he's in, she grabs his arm and uses his own momentum to flip him over onto his back. 

She plants her heel in his crotch, and then on his throat. "You are nothing to me," she says, voice shaking. "You are a /plague/ on this family. After this I /never/ want to see you again."

Thor coughs, once, twice, his hand coming up to hold her ankle in place. The little shit has the audacity to shoot her a grin, then a giggle, as though any of this is actually /funny/.

Hela presses her heel down, but feels someone grab her arm and pull her away. She isn’t surprised to find Loki.

“When we leave, don’t fucking call. Don’t call Loki again either. Stop dragging us back to your shit-show, Thor. You’re so goddamn toxic. You say mom tried to poison Loki when we were kids—you were the poison all this time.”

Thor chuckles again. 

“Haven’t we had this conversation already?”

“You—“

“Please don’t,” Loki begs. “It’s my fault too. I should’ve stopped him. I should’ve...”

Hela can’t take it. She yanks her arm from Loki’s hold and glares at him too, but holds her tongue, and storms away. Before she crosses the archway that leads back to the stairs, she hears Loki address Thor.

“What the hell is wrong with you...?”

It's the question they've all been asking for years. Hela isn't sure they'll ever have a good answer. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
*********

"What is /wrong/ with you?" Hela cries as Thor and Loki crash through the bathroom door as she's brushing her teeth to go to bed. Loki makes a bee-line for the toilet, dropping to his knees and throwing up violently. 

"Loki's sick," Thor explains, but his eyes are red and his words are blurring together and he can't quite keep his focus on one thing for more than a couple seconds. "Flu or somethin'. Might wanna get outta here." 

Hela stands there frozen with her toothbrush in her hand, as Thor gives her a goofy grin and goes to approach her. He tilts sideways, then grabs the towel rack, pulling it out of the wall as he falls backwards into the tub, landing in a tangle of shower curtain and limbs, laughing like it's the funniest thing to ever happen to him. 

"What is /wrong/ with you?!" Hela demands again, wondering if she should get Heimdall. Both Thor and Loki are obviously drunk or something, and Loki is getting sick and Thor is falling down and.... 

She rushes out of the bathroom and into her own room, throwing herself down onto the bed and crying.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
***********

“Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you, Thor?”

Thor sits up, rubbing at his neck, and at the arm Hela had twisted. Nothing feels broken, but he feels a slight aching from some parts—distant and muted, much like everything else.

This is how Thor prefers it.

“Jesus Christ... I can’t believe I... all my progress, and you—I let you talk me into it.”

“You took /one/,” Thor mumbles, getting yanked down from the floaty feeling he’d been starting to have. “Besides. You needed it.”

“You’re... god, Thor. What the hell is wrong with you...”

It isn’t phrased as a question this time, but still...

“You know I’ve been asking myself that question since that night? I keep thinking about why I am the way I am. I keep thinking about what the fuck is wrong with me, but you know what? I don’t fucking know either! All I know is I woke up feeling wrong, feeling like pieces of me were missing, and every fucking day since then, I’ve lost even more! So no, I don’t fucking know what’s wrong with me, only that me existing after that night is a goddamned mistake, and the misery I live with is this world’s way of correcting that!” Thor thinks he says.

“You really are the worst...” Loki whispers, his younger brother’s voice cutting into his awareness.

Thor realizes that he hasn’t said a single word at all. He wishes he did say all of that though, but those words have been locked inside him for years and years and years now. Besides...

What’s the point of voicing them out anymore?

What’s the point of any of it?

After all... Hela was right. She was right back then, and she’s right now too. He doesn’t get to feel sorry for himself. He’s the source of the problem to begin with.

Thor is fucking poison.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**************

“Thor, this is /poison/. All this time, you told me you were okay, that you—that you were just /tired/, or /worried/, or /afraid/—and all this time you’ve been /lying/ to me?”

Thor closes his eyes and tries to focus on Jane’s voice, tries to remind himself that she cares, and that’s why she’s pissed, why the anger rolling off of her in waves is because she’s scared /for/ him, not /of/ him. 

“I wasn’t lying, I swear. I /swear/—all those times... all the time... I am tired, and wound up, and everything... it’s just—“ Thor tugs at his hair when Jane takes a couple of steps away from him. “It’s just I was... self-medicating too.”

“/Heroin/, Thor. Heroin! And the drinking—and the... the cocaine! That is /not/ self medicating to handle your issues! That’s being a goddamn addict! I can’t just—Thor… I’ve got my whole future ahead of me. I just—this isn’t what I expected.” 

“But—“

“You’re an addict. And worse? You lied to me.”

“Jane—“

“Please leave.”

Thor feels the door to Jane’s entire being shut. He feels as though the connection he’d felt with her is severed, just like that, and he feels nothing from her. Just indifference.

He would have honestly preferred the anger.

The disappointment.

Anything. 

“Jane...”

“Leave. Just please go.”

Thor isn't sure he's felt this alone since he woke up in the hospital all those years ago. 

It sure feels about the same. Like part of him is missing. Parts just keep chipping away, and he isn't sure how much of /Thor/ is even left. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**********

"I'm leaving," Hela announces as she enters the kitchen. "I don't care about the storm. I don't care about the tree. I have a car coming to pick me up at the gates."

Heimdall looks up from his book in something slightly less than surprise.

"What happened?" he asks, having a feeling he knows the broad strokes. 

Hela is shaking.

"Thor - Thor - he..." She shakes her head, throws up a hand. "I'm done. Done with him. Let him fucking drink and drug himself to death for all I care." 

"Hela..." Heimdall begins to rise, but Hela backs away. 

"No, I can't anymore. You /know/ what he's taken from me! You /know/ what he did to me!" She wipes her eyes furiously. 

"You know the... the accident wasn't really Thor's fault," Heimdall points out, though he knows Hela has managed to pin the blame directly onto Thor. 

"I'm out. More than enough. I'll call you when I'm back in LA." 

She turns on her heel and stomps out of the room. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
*********

Loki in the driver's seat. Her husband in the passenger seat. Her in the back. Loki is swerving all over the road. She can smell liquor, but he had been with Thor and from what she'd been told, Thor had thrown up a couple times before the ambulance came. 

Fucking Thor.

Always fucking Thor, getting in the way, making his problems /their/ problems, and....

She wakes up on the pavement, blood streaming from between her legs and her husband halfway through the windshield. 

She's sure she's never going to stop screaming.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
************

Loki steers clear of both Hela and Thor for the rest of that evening. He knows he should find his older sister and apologize, knows he should find Thor and make sure he doesn’t crack his skull open falling down the stairs or through a window. Loki knows he should probably go stick with Heimdall, even, just to ask the man to make sure he /himself/ doesn’t do anything reckless.

Loki doesn’t go to find anyone, though, instead heading towards the kitchen and making himself some tea on autopilot.

He keeps hoping being here would remind him of that night—would send him there instead of all the other places, but it’s just never happened.

Loki sits himself down with his favorite mug once it’s done and waits.

He waits, checks his watch, and waits some more.

Eventually, Loki blinks, and he opens his eyes in a different room, this one he hasn’t seen or remembered in ages. He feels the heat of another person on top of him, feels a mouth on his neck and the length of a cock between his ass, and Loki... Loki decides he can lose himself in this for a while.

Doesn’t matter who it is. 

Doesn’t matter when it is.

He knows it’s going to be over soon, anyways—his little trips down memory lane don’t usually last long anymore, and this’ll probably end as soon as whoever is on top of him cums. Loki moans, and writhes, and loses himself in the sensation, and when he feels his partner climax, he closes his eyes and sighs.

And then Fandral speaks, and Loki entirely forgets that he ever expected to be anywhere else.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
************

“You’re fucking tight, real amazing, Lo-cakes,” comes Fandral voice, and Loki grins and leans up, opening his mouth for a deep kiss. 

The messy room is filled with the heady scent of sweat and sex, and Loki feels limp and languid, a boneless mess after the glorious fucking he’d just had. 

“S’better when we don’t have to be quiet ‘bout it, huh?”

It /is/ better. It's /so/ much better when they don't have to tiptoe around the third person in the apartment, when he doesn't have to have his heart in his throat expecting Thor to barge in any moment. But ever since Thor got a /girlfriend/ - somebody from the local university, even! - he's been able to have more and more time alone with Fan. 

It also means Thor doesn't hold a monopoly over all of the heroin anymore, too, which is nice. It's not Loki's preferred drug anymore - molly now takes that lofty position - but it definitely smoothes out the rough edges.

He gets why Thor likes it, but he's not Thor. 

He can handle himself. And right now he doesn't want to think about Thor at all, nestled in Fandral's arms on the sofa, the TV show they had been watching before creating their own adult entertainment still playing softly in the background. 

It's perfect, really, and Loki has rarely felt more at peace. Not since he was little. Not since before mom died. 

He should have known it wouldn't last.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
************

Thor stares in the mirror. The Inside Out Man stares back. Thor lifts the bottle of scotch to his lips and the Inside Out Man mimes lifting a bottle to his lipless mouth. 

"Leave me alone," Thor growls, setting the bottle down and leaning over the sink, gripping the edges tight enough to turn his knuckles white. 

The Inside Out Man mimics the movement.

Thor is starting to find that the more time he spends in the house, the less inclined he is to feel afraid. So far, the Inside Out Man seems like it's only interested in him—not in Hela, or in Loki. It’s interested in just /Thor/. It’s both a benefit and a disadvantage.

For one, at least Thor needn’t be worried about his siblings getting fed on, but for another, Thor is constantly on alert because he sees it /everywhere/.

“Leave me alone!” Thor growls again.

This time, Thor tries raising his hand, threatening to smash the mirror. The Inside Out Man just follows along as well, never missing a beat. There isn’t even a desynchronization between their movements.

“What do you want?” Thor asks instead, lowering his fisted hand, feeling his gut churn and his chest clench. “What the fuck do you want from me?!”

The Inside Out Man doesn’t answer.

Thor figures he can find his own answers. He figures that while it might not be pleasant, it would be better than just cowering—so he raises his hand once more, this time, sliding his palm onto the mirror’s surface, bracing for the malice and the hunger, the sense of /evil/ consume him.

Instead, Thor feels nothing.

He stares at the point where their hands connect on the mirror, and wonders what it implies. Nothing has ever been able to trick him—trick his ability to feel their true intent—he wonders, and fears, what the nothingness means.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
***********

Thor feels nothing as his feet take him back to Fandral’s apartment. Sure, he senses other people’s emotional states leaking in here and there, but of his own, there’s nothing.

He feels nothing as he takes the steps up. 

Feels nothing as he turns the knob.

Feels nothing as he finds Fandral fucking his little brother, Loki with his back to his friend, gripping the couch, both of them naked and very, very busy, it seems. 

He continues to feel nothing even as the two break apart—from Fandral an outpouring of guilt, shame and embarrassment, and from Loki, much the same, but with an added touch of anger. Fury, even.

He feels nothing, and he looks up at his little brother, and his heart breaks twice that same night, because now he’s sure that Loki really was pushing him away—pushing him towards the drugs—leaving him behind.

“What the fuck, Thor! You said you were going to Jane’s, you fucking psycho!”

"I did!" Thor shouts back, stomping over to the table and grabbing one of the beer bottles littering it and chugging it down, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "She figured it out. The—the..." He gestures helplessly at the table, the piles of drugs and paraphernalia. "I didn't have a chance to explain, she told me to leave, I can't—I don't—" He doesn't know what to do. He can't live without Jane, her gentle and soft guidance, her urging towards /wanting/ to change. 

He wants to die instead, and what Loki says next makes the feeling double.

"I can't hold your hand through every little thing, Thor!" Loki shouts at him. "I have my own life! My own shit to deal with! You're a fucking adult, figure your shit out!"

Fandral looks like he wants to disappear, and if Thor could make the floor swallow all three of them up, he would. He feels Loki's anger like a knife in the side. 

"I need you," Thor begs. 

Loki shakes his head. "I don't owe you anything," he says. "And neither did Jane. It's good she left when she did. You ruin everything you touch." 

Thor stands there, speechless, for a moment before Fandral breaks the spell.

"Um. Sorry Thor, but, uh, I can't sell to you anymore. It doesn't feel good, you're not -" The man Thor had /thought/ was his friend sighs. 

Jane. Loki. Fandral. 

Thor feels his heart split, a piece of himself splintering off. "Please..." he whispers, a prayer, a plea. 

Fandral leans over the table, filling a pill bottle with pressed tabs. "A parting gift, at least," he says, ignoring Loki's protest. "Its hard as fuck to get fentanyl in tablet form, so... just know how big a favor this is."

He puts an arm around Thor's shoulders, leading him towards the door as Loki angrily collects his own clothing. "I'm sorry, man. But this shit will help, I promise. And it should last, every one of those pills is like four of your usual doses, so just, like, split 'em up or something."

Thor looks down at the bottle in his hand. "Yeah, sure," he responds, dazed. 

Fandral closes the door in his face.

Thor stands there for a full five minutes, and he blanks out, trying to ignore how his entire being feels like it’s spiraling. When he finally does start moving, he’s unaware that his feet have started taking him back upstairs, back into the streets.

Thor takes his phone out, hands shaking as he dials a number. 

“Do you even know what time it is?” Comes Hela’s voice on the other end, grumbling and annoyed, though clearly still awake—he hadn’t woken her up or anything. “What do you want?”

Thor feels tears slip down his cheeks, and the next breath he takes is little more than a sob. He’s able to take a couple more before he answers Hela.

“I... I just need... I need someone? I—Loki... can’t. I can’t go back to Jane’s either. I—“

“God, how fucked up are you, Thor?” Hela huffs. Someone says something he can’t make out, and Thor mentally kicks himself. Of course she’d also be with her partner. There’s a sigh on the other end. “Listen. Whatever it is, it’ll be out of your system soon. Go home and sleep it off. Or I don’t know, go out, grab a couple of beers? Drink yourself stupid, since that always seems to work out for you anyways, and if you still want to play this game, call me in the morning. Sounds good?”

It doesn’t, and the last glimmer of hope dies. Thor ends the call and just stands there, falling apart at the seams. 

Alone.

Lost.

Not knowing what else to do.

Well... that last one is a lie—Thor knows one thing he /can/ do. The /only/ thing he can do at this point, really.

He walks, and walks, and walks, and when he finally stops walking, he welcomes death with open arms.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
***********

Loki blinks and he's in the kitchen. He sees a superimposed image of his mother, himself, and Thor sitting at the table. He knows it can't really be there but it really does seem real.

"I tucked you away, then," the horrible creature beside him says. "But you should know the truth." 

Loki watches as Frigga sits them both down at the table, smiling, but strangely. He watches as she pours them all tea. He watches both himself and Thor raise their cups to their lips. Loki drinks. 

Thor doesn't. 

Loki begins spasming. Thor begins screaming. Frigga takes up the red gas canister and pours it over the kitchen. 

Loki blinks, and there's nothing else there. Nothing but himself and a truth he can't quite pinpoint. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**********

The truth is a slippery thing. Like, when Thor asks him if it's a good time to take another shot of heroin, or pill, or snort, or another bottle of whatever... Loki always agrees. Because it helps Loki feel good too, and it helps get Thor out of the way. 

"Here, you can have mine too," he offers, handing over his share of the morphine pills, aching for Thor to just /black out already/ so he and Fan can have some time alone.

He meets the other man’s eyes from where Fandral is sprawled on the couch, the man nodding once to indicate it’s safe.

Loki drops the little pills in Thor’s open palm. His brother‘s head knocks against his shoulder, and Loki looks over at him. Thor has a dazed look in his eyes, but he also seems... a little despondent. A little sad. He doesn’t even knock the pills back right away.

“What?” 

“Y’know, I really— really fuckin’ love you, right Lo?” Thor declares, shifting to grab Loki’s arm with his free hand. “You—you’re my li’l bruh-brother. Y’know tha’?”

Loki lets out an uneasy chuckle, a bit of guilt creeping into his chest. Thor always /always/ seems to do this every time he and Fan want to have a bit of fun.

“Course I know, you idiot.”

Thor hums. “You’re s’pposed to say you love me back.” Loki freezes, and Thor lets out a laugh. “M’really uh— fuh—fucked up. You’ll take care f’me, Lo?”

Loki lets out a breath. He doesn’t like lying to his brother, so he doesn’t, and just yanks his arm out of Thor’s grasp. He plucks the little pills from Thor’s open palm and offers them to his brother’s mouth. 

“Open up.”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**************

“What do you mean, /no/? You have to! You gotta—just to town or something! You gotta take us with you.”

Thor feels the anger-tinged panic stab him through the chest when Hela just ignores him. Her vindictiveness makes Thor want to grab her and shake some sense into her—or get on his knees and beg her to take them. 

“Or you can take Loki. Please at least take Loki—please!”

Hela stares down at him with something Thor can only describe as indifference. It's terrible. It's heartbreaking. It tells him that this house is going to eat him alive and probably Loki too if he doesn't do something and soon. 

He doesn't really know what to do, though.

How does he stop this unraveling of his family and his sanity?

How does he undo all the years of pain?

There's no way. He can't. He will never come back from this weekend, not whole anyway. He hopes Loki will be safe in his... wherever he goes when he goes distant. 

In the end, Thor is the only one to blame for any of it. He can live with that, if it keeps the rest of them safe.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
***********

"Mom, can I?" Loki asks, looking up at Frigga, his hands stuck in the mud, ready to prepare a projectile to launch at his brother.

At Frigga's wink and sly smile, Loki calls out to get Thor's attention.

He stays his hand, the mud slipping down onto the ground.

"Why am I living things that already happened?" he asks. "Why here all the time?

"This was the most peaceful place I could think of," Thor replies, coming nearer. He's flickering between child and grownup. It scares Loki. He screams. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
***********

Loki finds himself in the wine cellar. There isn't anything here; they hadn't lived here long enough to stock it well, and he was never particularly interested in liquor the way his brother was. 

But he doesn't know how he got down here, or why he would have ventured this way. An episode, again.

He sighs, but this time, he doesn’t immediately move to leave the room. Instead, Loki walks around, touching the walls lined with cobwebs, the wooden racks built into them long rotten and hollowed out. The door behind him that leads to the basement proper where their washer and other stuff had been stored is still swung wide open, so there’s a little light that comes in from there.

Loki wonders why here, of all places. He’s always wondered why he wakes up where he does.

When he finds no answers to that question in the cellar, Loki turns around and leaves. He isn’t as wound up about being in the house anymore, is just more disappointed than anything when he finds nothing out of the ordinary. 

It’s just a house, and nothing more, Loki thinks, as he takes the first step of the stairs leading up to the kitchen.

“Are you sure about that?”

Loki whips around at the sound of Thor’s voice, a verbal lashing ready to fall out of his mouth to scold his brother for sneaking up on him and hiding, but he finds nobody. It’s still empty. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

THEN  
***********

“No! No, let me go! Loki! Loki! Let me go!” Thor screams, trying to pull his arm away from Frigga’s grasp. “Let me go! What did you do to him?! What did you do?!?”

Mom’s face looks like it’s about to break, like she’s ready to just start crying as much as Thor is crying, but she’s still pulling him down into the basement, her resolve to... to do something not wavering, and it doesn’t make sense.

It doesn’t make any /sense/!

“Dad! Hela! Loki! No! No, no, no! Help! Someone help!”

They reach the bottom of the steps, and mom drags him further in, forces him towards the back, to the cellar where dad keeps his wine, and shoves him in. She has a smile on her face, and she actually /is/ crying now, and Thor can feel her regret.

“My special boy... my little spark,” mama coos, but it’s not her. It can’t be. This is a monster in mama’s body, “I am so, so sorry, my love, but this is the only way. Please forgive your mother, okay?”

“Mama... mama please,” Thor begs, “mama please, I’m scared. I’m so scared, mama, don’t do this. Please let me up. Let me out and let me help Loki. Please mama”

“I’m so, so sorry, Thor. I love you very much, my darling, you won’t feel a thing. You’ll be going to sleep in just another couple of minutes, now, and we’ll wake up together, okay? I love you.”

Mama shuts the door, and Thor is plunged into darkness.

He doesn’t go to sleep until the smoke has filled his lungs and drowns him.

Right before he loses consciousness, Thor looks towards the cellar door as it opens. He hopes it’s salvation, someone here to save him, but instead, in the doorway, stands the Inside Out Man.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**********

Thor chokes on his own guilt - and probably the alcohol has something to do with it - and manages to bring up about half a gallon of liquor onto the floor. 

He needs to do something. It's the only thought he has had in his head for what seems like hours now. He needs to move. He needs to... to... He's afraid he's beginning to forget.

He's afraid he'll be trapped in the house like all the others.

Truly he wouldn't be able to bear such monotony for all eternity. Though it's starting to look like no life of Thor's, mortal or supernatural, is to be without pain. 

He wakes in the middle of flame.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

THEN  
**************

“It’s all your fucking fault. Loki’s going to jail, and I lost—I’ve lost /everything/ because of you! You took everything away!”

“Hela...”

“No! /No/. I am /done/ making excuses for this useless piece of garbage! If you had just—if you had just /died/ that night, maybe I’d still have my husband. I’d still have my—I’d still have my baby—“ Hela sobs, she sobs so brokenly, as though none of her pieces will ever fit back together, as if she’ll never be whole again for the rest of her life. Thor knows that feeling intimately. “If only it was you instead of mom... none of this would’ve ever happened. If you just fucking died in that fire!”

Thor doesn’t have it in him to tell her that he did.

He's been dead for at least as long as mom has been. Oh, maybe not physically. Physically he's still sleeping and waking and walking and breathing. But otherwise? It's like he's a zombie. Worthless for anything but causing pain.

"Didn’t mean to," he manages to gasp out. They hadn't been gentle when they'd shoved the tubes down his throat. He feels raw and torn apart.

And now that he knows what happened, now that he has realized what his actions have wrought... he wishes he had taken the entire bottle of fentanyl instead of just half of it. Wishes he'd had more to drink to wash it down.

Wishes he hadn't woken up at all. 

Because he's alone. Dreadfully and truly alone. He finds himself desperately dialing Jane's number, because she is the only other person in the world who might be able to make this better.

She says she'll come. 

She arrives within the hour, and her hand on his head makes him feel whole again. 

"I'm so sorry, Thor," she says, sincerely. He can feel her guilt pouring off of her even without touching her. "I'm so sorry. I never should have left."

Thor blinks at her, tiredly. As long as he isn't alone, he really doesn't care.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**************

Hela leaves.

Hela leaves, just as she had done all those years ago.

Thor and Loki stand shoulder to shoulder, watching as the car that fetched her peels away. Thor tries not to feel mad that Loki hadn’t gone with her, had chosen to stay even if Hela had asked if he wanted to come. He tries not to get mad at Heimdall for flat out refusing to try to make the same arrangements. 

Loki mumbles that he’s going to head back inside, going to go through some of dad’s stuff, but Thor simply just stays there, looking out towards the empty driveway.

He doesn’t know how long he stands there, but in the blink of an eye, it’s suddenly dark, but not completely. There’s a bright orange glow from behind him, heat scorching his back, and in front are flashing red lights.

The noise hits him next.

Sirens. 

Firefighters barking orders at each other.

Screaming.

A young Loki is screaming his name, being held back by Odin. Hela wailing on his other arm. Thor turns around and finds the house ablaze.

He walks in, towards the kitchen, where mom’s body is a charred mess, still ablaze, burnt beyond recognition, then towards the doors going down to the basement. There’s a fire down here, too, all their clothes, the washing machine and dryer, the old couch they’d said they would throw away soon... all wrapped in bright orange.

Thor’s feet take him towards the cellar door, then, and he grabs the handle—hot—so fucking hot—and twists it open.

There, on the floor, a younger version of himself manages to lift his head before his last breath rattles out of him, before the heart in his little body gives out.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
***********

Thor watches in horror as Loki falls off his chair onto the floor, moaning and writing and foaming at the mouth. Thor recognizes the smell in the tea, suddenly. Recognizes the smell of the nightshade. Recognizes what their mother has done. 

What she is currently doing.

It can't be her, it can't be. It must be all the other creatures in here, making her act. Dumping the gasoline over herself. All over the kitchen.

Thor drags Loki to the foyer, then runs back into the kitchen just in time for Frigga to grab his arm and drag him to the basement.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
***********

Thor is nearly out of liquor. He's on his second to the last bottle, and neither are about to last long, given Hela's sudden departure, Heimdall's indifference, and Loki's anger. Not to mention the mockery from all of the ghosts.

They keep trying to trick him—whittling away at his sanity and making him doubt himself, making him doubt his memory of what he’d seen that night. What he had lived through.

It reminds him of how Loki used to love doing that, making him think he’s insane.

Hiding in corners and jumping out to scare him.

Staying at the very edge of his periphery and running when Thor does a double take. 

Placing Hela’s dolls right where he knows Thor will find them.

Now, Loki thinks he’s actually crazy. And Thor... well, Thor actually does feel crazy sometimes now too, because the ghosts he can see clear as day are as invisible to the rest as they always have been. They’re bolder too, and appear to Thor even when Loki or Heimdall are there. 

Like right now.

This one, he’s never seen before, and Thor tries not to say anything as it sits right at the floor by Loki’s feet, head leaned against Loki’s knee. His brother doesn’t notice at all, reading through one of dad’s journals.

All Thor can do is stare at the faceless figure playing with the little doll figure of their sister.

From size and build, this one is a child. Blond hair and blank, uninterrupted skin where facial features should be. "You should have a face," Thor murmurs, tilting the bottle against his lips again. 

The ghost vanishes and Loki doesn't even look up from his reading. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
*************

"I swear, Loki, I swear I saw something in the mirror. Right behind me, I swear." Thor clutches Loki's shoulders tight, willing his brother to believe him. 

Loki raises his hands to cover Thor's, while Fandral rises from the couch and comes over in curiosity. "Thor, there was nothing there. You're just high. If you take some more, it'll go away. Just take more, Thor, it will make it better." He blinks. 

"I'm sorry I did that to you," Loki says. "I don't know why I'm in your memory, but I'm sorry I ended up... making you worse." He bows his head. 

Thor reaches out for the baggie of heroin that will block out the rest of the night and let him get some sleep. Loki doesn't know what he's talking about. This isn't a memory, and this is Thor's choice. 

Everything is fine. Just, perfectly splendid.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**********

Loki is jolted out of being tucked away by a clap of thunder. The sound of rain pouring down outside soon registers too. 

There’s an open journal on his lap, the fireplace is crackling away, and Thor is snoring where he’s curled up on the large leather chair right across from where Loki is sitting. 

Thor looks... not at peace, exactly, but at least he’s significantly less wound up like this. He looks exhausted, though, even in his sleep. Loki rubs at his own eyes, standing up and making his way towards his brother.

Something crunches under his foot, and he steps away to find one of Hela’s old toys—a doll of her. 

Unease suddenly settles inside of him again, and Loki can’t swallow it down. He takes his phone out and checks his messages, then decides he should call Hela. Make sure she got to the airport, at least. 

It rings once.

Twice.

Three times. 

The unease grows into fear—fear of what could have happened. What if she never made it to the airport? What if they got caught in the rain and needed to stop because of the downpour?

What if... what if she got into an accident? 

It rings five times before Hela picks up, grumbling.

“I told you I’d call Heimdall once I was in LA.”

“Just checking up on you. You’re still driving?”

“Yeah,” she answers curtly. Loki gnaws on his lip.

“Listen, Hela, I—I’m sorry. I don’t... I shouldn’t have let Thor... fuck, what am I saying, it was my fault. I shouldn’t have done what I did. I’m sorry.”

Hela sighs audibly from the other end, “I know. Don’t let him get to your head, Loki. You’re doing so much better, don’t throw that away.”

She drops the call, not letting him say anything, and Loki stares down at his phone, then at the doll still on the floor. He picks it up and dusts it off, slipping it in his pocket and shaking his head. Hela is right—he shouldn’t let his older brother get to his head. He knows this little thing was probably Thor, trying to do that exactly that... even if his gut says otherwise.

He ignores the noises of the house as makes his way through it to grab some blankets from the linen closet.

Ignores the figures he sees peering at him from the corner of his eyes. 

It’s just Thor, trying to get into his head. 

It’s all Thor.

\-----------------  
THEN  
***********

"Why do you look like that?" Loki asks the Inside Out Man once he finds he can speak again.

His heart is pounding in his chest so hard he thinks it might burst right out of his ribcage, but he doesn't feel afraid, not at this moment. He knows he should, that Thor is terrified of this monster, this thing that goes bump in the night, which means Loki should be too. For the moment, though, Loki is mostly just curious. 

The Inside Out Man tilts his head and raises one bloody, bony hand to his bloody, skinless face.

"Because I made mistakes," the Inside Out Man replies, and his voice is raspy but familiar. "I won't hurt you, though. I'll keep you safe."

"Why don't I ever remember talking to you?" Loki demands. He is sure he has before, the thing is too familiar and knows too much about Loki for this to be the first time. But he doesn't remember. 

"I'm just trying to protect you," the Inside Out Man says. "It will be okay." He reaches out to touch Loki's arm....

And Loki wakes up in the garden, the dewy grass soaking through his pajamas. Thor is shaking his shoulder, his little face pinched with worry.

"I couldn't find you!" Thor exclaims. "You weren't even in the dollhouse!" 

Loki looks up at Thor, then down at the doll laying, too, in the wet grass.

He lets Thor pull him up, let’s his big brother embrace him and rub some warmth back into his arms. His brother grabs his cheeks, and Loki, still trying to remember his dream, frowns even more as he lets Thor search his eyes.

What his brother is looking for, Loki doesn’t know. 

“I can’t remember my dream,” Loki mumbles, perhaps more upset than he should be.

Thor lets out a breath, shaking his head and helping him to his feet.

“I’m sure it wasn’t important. Lets go back.”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
*******************

Thor is down in the basement again, though this time, there aren’t any flames burning all around him—real or imaginary. 

This is the only place in the house Odin hadn’t really fixed up after the fire. Sure, there are new machines, and more junk has found its way down here, but Thor can still see scorch marks on the walls. He can still see where the old pipes had melted off. Can even see remnants of the old junk, half burnt away.

Thor doesn’t care about any of those, though. The only thing he’s interested in is the wine cellar.

There has to be something down here, there has to be. He doesn't remember specifically what all was kept in the wine cellar, if there's anything at all, but he's down to the last dregs of the liquor from upstairs, and if he's going to survive any longer here, he needs more. 

He trails his fingers along fire-scorched walls, listening to the screaming of the house down here, so much louder than anywhere else. It feels like he's being sucked deeper into the bowels of the house and he is in turns terrified and accepting. 

He hears a swish-swish of long skirts as he reaches the door he has been searching for - and it feels like he's been groping blind through a maze.

He reaches for the knob, trying very hard to ignore the soft touch on his shoulder, the whispered, "My little spark," in his ear. 

He half expects the knob to burn him, to scorch his hand and force him away, but the door swings open with a creak of old and rusty hinges. 

The room is, of course, empty. Thor slumps in defeat; he should have realized anything down here before would have been thoroughly destroyed in the fire, and given the state of the rest of the basement, it's little wonder that Odin didn't feel like restocking the cellar was a priority. 

Well. That's it, then. The last thing he has to keep the ghosts at bay, gone. He's going to have to go through withdrawal in this house if they don't get out of here very soon; he isn't sure he's strong enough to survive that. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**********

"Shh, I know you're uncomfortable, but it'll be over soon, I promise," Jane murmurs to him as he writhes and moans in the hospital bed, trying to find a comfortable position around the tubes and wires he's covered in. 

Apparently, according to the doctors, it's a miracle he survived that amount of fentanyl and vodka. Most people, he had been told, would have died after one pill, let alone ten of them. 

But Jane is here, /Jane/ is here! He keeps forgetting and then remembering that Jane—she came back. She came back and she's stroking his hair and feeding him ice chips and offering to take him away from all of this. 

"I got a fellowship at an observatory in New Mexico," she tells him in between taking care of him and reading some huge textbook with planets on the front of it. "I think you should come with me. It'll be good for you to get away from... all of this."

Thor couldn't agree more. Maybe his ghosts won't follow him to New Mexico. He can start fresh, away from the stifling and always a little sad watch of Heimdall, away from his lying traitor of a brother, his angry yet indifferent sister. 

"Yeah, okay," he says, squeezing her hand.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**************

Loki is at a loss.

It isn’t exactly a new feeling, but he hadn’t felt this aimless since he’d gotten sober, and it makes him highly uneasy. It’s an unwelcome feeling. 

There’s absolutely nothing in dad’s journals that make even the slightest bit of sense, and it’s awful because... well, because there’s still no /closure/. He doesn’t know what answer he’s looking for, doesn’t even know what question he’s asking, but Loki just knows that there’s something missing. 

Thor isn’t helping at all, either, with how he’s spiraling. How he keeps trying to fuck with Loki’s head with his glaring at empty corners and hissing at the air when he thinks he’s by himself. It’s going to get worse too, because he knows Thor is going to start feeling the symptoms of withdrawal soon, and if his brother is this unbearable now, Loki can only imagine how he’ll be when it hits full force.

“You’ve been busy reading those,” he hears Heimdall say as the man walks into the sitting room, “any insights?”

Loki sighs and presses his thumb and forefinger against his eyes, shaking his head.

"Nothing," he admits. "Just - fragments of things. I can't make sense of any of it, none of it seems linear, dates don't line up, it's..." He rakes a hand through his hair. "It's frustrating," he admits. 

Heimdall takes the chair across from Loki, the chair Thor had vacated in order to go hunting for more ways to melt his brain.

"I didn't often speak to him after everything happened," the older man admits. "But whenever I did, he sounded..."

Loki looks down at the writings, the once-familiar scrawl of his adoptive father's handwriting. "It sounds like Thor does. Did. Sometimes. Do you remember?" 

"There are a lot of reasons that could be," Heimdall points out. "Inherited..."

"But I don't understand how he knows some of what he wrote about," Loki adds. "He writes things about /us/, like he knew what was happening. He wrote—did you tell him about Hela's? About the—the accident."

He still doesn't like to think about it, even years after the fact, even after he'd pieced his life back together after prison. 

"I told him that his children needed him," Heimdall says softly. "He told me that Frigga needed him more. I... assumed he had gone mad from grief." 

"But you didn’t give details?" Loki presses, and Heimdall shakes his head. " 'Thor came to visit today. He looked ill, and didn't stay for long. After he left, a man and a child came. The child was my grandson, but he's gone now too." Loki looks up at Heimdall. "What do you make of that?"

Heimdall shakes his head. "I honestly don't know," he admits.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
***********

Loki stares down at his cuffed hands silently, listening to his sister's wails of agony. A nurse jabs him with a needle to take a blood sample, and another hands him a cup to piss in. The cops who had cuffed him watch him do it. 

Loki knows he's fucked. He knows he's gone and ruined his entire life. Ruined Hela's life. And Thor—oh, fuck, it's /his/ fault Thor—

This is all Loki's fault. 

"It's nobody's fault," the Inside Out Man says, sitting down beside him. "And this isn't where I wanted you to go." 

Loki turns his head to ask—something—but the thought disappears when he realizes he's got his hands in the dirt. Hela and Thor are shrieking and laughing as they run behind him. 

Frigga smiles down at him as he fills his dirt hole with water.

"This isn't right," Loki says. 

Frigga's smile grows sad. "Your brother is trying his best," she says. "He'll figure it out. Give him a little more time."

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

NOW  
************

Thor is in pain. 

He’s gone cold turkey before, so he knows what to expect. It’s a familiar pain, after all, and one he’s experienced multiple times before. This time, though, it’s with the knowledge that he won’t be relapsing if it gets to be too much. This time, he knows he’s going to have to stick it out for however long they’re going to be trapped here, or however long Loki intends to stay.

It’s terrible fucking timing on Loki’s part, since it seems like his little brother is suddenly fascinated with the house, even if he /still/ doesn’t acknowledge the ghosts.

Thor already has.

He’s already found more of them than he’d originally thought, even.

Now, the ghost that’s there, just standing at his bedroom door while Thor tries to stop trembling, is the little one. The ghost-child with no face, except now, it actually does have one, even if it’s just a mask.

“Leave me alone,” Thor moans, curling up even more. He doesn’t really want to deal with any these right now. “M’not in the mood.”

The tiny thing just shuffles closer, two stuttering steps, the long blonde locks swishing.

“Go away,” Thor huffs.

The boy comes to stand by Thor’s bed, seeming like it’s looking at him through the holes in the clown mask it’s got on. This up close, Thor can see the skin where the eyes should be. 

“Please just leave me alone.” 

The little ghost boy holds out a hand, offering it. Thor looks at it, too pale, fingers barely half the length of Thor’s own.

Too small, too young. Suddenly he feels sorry for whoever this soul belongs to, how lonely it feels—how eager to help. He reaches out with a shaky hand and clasps the ghost boy’s tiny one, marveling at the warmth. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
***************

“Oh? What’s this?”

Thor looks up at mama, giving her a wide grin as he adjusts his baby brother’s bum on his lap. Loki looks up and pouts at her, saying a firm ‘no!’ even if mama hasn’t said anything yet.

“I’m reading Loki a story, mama,” Thor tells her proudly, showing the open book on Loki’s lap.

She doesn’t have to know he’s not /reading/ as much as making his own story. What’s the point in reading it to Loki if he’s already heard it from mama? Thor’s versions are waaaay better anyways.

“My, and what story are we telling our little brother, hm?” Mama asks, sitting down beside both of them. 

Thor giggles at her. 

She’s silly.

“He’s not /your/ little brother, mama, he’s your baby! Loki is my little brother.”

“He is.”

“He is!” Loki echoes, then pulls on Thor’s hair, face turning pouty. “Story! Tell story! Story time!”

“Oh, is it story time?” Hela asks from the doorway, running in and sitting down on Thor’s other side. “You didn’t start without me, did you? You /always/ start when I’m brushing my teeth.”

“It’s not my fault!”

Then, as though to prove Thor’s innocence, Loki shrieks, “Want story /now/!”

Thor shushes Loki and starts again, enjoying the fact that everyone is listening with rapt attention.

"A long long long time ago, there was a princess and two princes..."

\---------‐----------  
NOW  
**********

Loki worries his lip and picks at his palm as Thor moans in pain. He knows they should leave the house now—the storm has all but passed, and Thor needs medical attention, but every time he goes for his keys, or heads towards the door, he finds himself back in the garden. 

Heimdall says he's going to go out to see if he can clear a path to the road, but he hasn't been back for hours. 

Thor is sicker than Loki has ever seen him, and he's seen Thor dealing with withdrawal several times. Has dealt with withdrawal himself, just as many times as Thor. But this isn't just the heroin leaving his system, it's the alcohol, and that, Loki knows, is what is going to hurt his brother in the long run if they don't get out of here.

"Can you get up?" he asks.

Thor responds by coughing and reaching a hand out for something Loki can't see. "I'm going to see how Heimdall is coming along," he says, turning towards the door. 

The door leads out into the garden, and Loki watches as he throws a glob of mud at Thor's face. He watches himself and Thor and Hela shriek and run and play, watches Frigga looking on. 

"What..."

"We're doing our best," the Inside Out Man says from behind him, and his voice sounds like Thor's, if Thor had swallowed broken glass and sand. "Just a little longer. Just give us a little longer. We're doing our best." 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
***********

"I'm doing my best!" Thor exclaims, rising from the couch, circling around it to put himself in front of Jane. "I'm trying!"

Jane huffs her annoyance. "Not very hard," she accuses. "I know you've got a lot to deal with. But you haven't gone to the therapist I booked and you haven't seen the doctor like I asked you to. You haven't looked for a job. And—are you /drunk/ right now?"

Thor swallows heavily. "I'm trying my best," he repeats.

Her annoyance turns into disappointment, turns into regret, turns into resolve. 

“Thor, you promised. I’ve kept up my end of it, I’ve given you everything I could think you’d ever need,” Jane starts, “but there’s only so much I can give, Thor. I can’t... I—it’s not good. It’s not healthy. I can’t keep giving pieces of myself for you until nothing is left to take, Thor. I can’t put my life on hold.”

Thor feels his chest clench, stomach cramping uncomfortably. He’s lived through this already—it’s another moment in his life where he’d felt splintered into more pieces than he already had been. 

“I‘d give myself up for Loki,” he tells Jane. 

She smiles up at him sadly—Thor doesn’t remember this part. “We did. We always will.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s our little brother. Because we love him.”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**************

Thor opens his eyes blearily, and sees the shadow of the most recent ghost back away. A blink later, and it’s gone completely, leaving Thor with just Loki sitting there beside his bed, one of Thor’s hands cradled in two of his own.

“Hey,” Loki greets, “how are you feeling?”

Awful, Thor thinks—still a bit confused, but he’s... he’s starting to realize it. Piece it together. He doesn’t know or understand /how/, but... it’s the only explanation. 

“Thor?”

“Here,” Thor answers, but he isn’t even sure of /that/ either. He feels unmoored. “M’still here.”

Still here.

For now, anyways.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
********

Thor swallows nervously as he's patted down before going into the prison. He doesn't have anything on him, and he's sober, but there's still the lingering fear he'll get caught, found out, that he'll lose someone else somehow because of his own stupidity. 

He hadn't known, really, what to do after Jane had asked for her house key back. She'd given him enough money for the first month's rent on a shitty trailer in a shittier trailer park—his neighbors cook good meth, at least. 

But a week of being awake and jumping at shadows, he decides to make the trip to see his brother. Hela has cut him off entirely, but surely Loki would be glad he came to visit.

Loki comes to the visitor's room in an orange jumpsuit. He isn't handcuffed, not like the last time Thor had seen him, and he looks drawn and tired.

"Why are you here?" he asks.

He doesn't sit. He doesn't smile.

"I thought I could—" 

Loki shakes his head. "I don't want to see you. I—can't. Please just—just go." 

Thor opens and closes his mouth a few times, another sliver of himself fracturing off, leaving him feeling even less whole than before. 

Loki walks away.

Thor goes back to New Mexico. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
*********

"Once upon a time, there was a princess and two princes, and the older prince was cruel and selfish and greedy, and he hurt the princess and the other prince. He hurt them, and then mother hurt him to keep it from happening. Or... mother hurt him and then we hurt them?" The child tilts its head to the side. The clown mask has been replaced by a porcelain doll face. 

"I don't know what you're talking about," Thor says, jerking as he feels a cold hand on his wrist. Somehow, it makes the raging fire in his veins settle a little.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
***********

Thor pulls away from the cock that had just been in his mouth, wiping his lips as he stares up at his current customer, raising his hand palm-side up to ask for his pay. The other man smirks, then grabs Thor by the hair, pulling him up easily.

“The fuck—“ Thor starts, but he’s shoved against the exposed brick wall outside the bar they’d been in, the breath getting knocked out of him. 

The guy behind him leans his entire body against Thor’s back, grinding his hips slightly. 

“Fuck—get the /fuck/ off me! This isn’t what we agreed to!”

“Shut up and take it,” the stranger huffs, breath reeking of alcohol as he pulls down Thor’s pants, just enough to expose his ass. “Take it like the bitch you are. Nobody’s gonna come, even if you scream.”

“Get off me!”

“Well. /Somebody’s/ gonna cum, but it won’t be you,” the man jokes, and Thor struggles against the hold. 

In the end, though, no matter how much he struggles, he can’t break free. He’s too weak, too drugged out, too drunk, too... too desperate—so Thor takes it. He takes it, and he feels every filthy desire the man wants, every disgusting thought as the other rams into his ass. Thor grunts and takes it.

After, the man slips something into his hand and Thor pulls his pants up, despite the spend leaking down his legs. 

Thor leans his back against the wall, lets himself slide down.

He looks at the twenty dollars in his hand and starts sobbing. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**************

Loki watches as Thor sobs into his pillow, his cries uncontrollable and painful to hear. It isn’t just the withdrawal anymore, Loki figures—it’s too raw to be just the withdrawal, but he doesn’t know what to /do/.

Heimdall still isn’t back, and now Loki is worried about their guardian too, and it’s just... it’s too much. It’s too much, and he didn’t ask for any of this.

He just wanted to bury his father, damn it!

“I’m sorry... this is painful for him too. You don’t have to see it. It’s okay. I’ll make it okay.”

Loki turns towards the voice, but when he does, he finds he’s thrown a glob of wet mud towards Thor. 

“Stop it... stop this! I don’t want this anymore!”

Little Thor, face still muddied, walks over and takes Loki’s hand. His bright blue eyes are dull, and there’s no smile on his face this time.

“He’s going to meet me soon. Please be patient with him, okay?”

"I don't know what's happening," Loki whimpers, feeling ridiculous for being so afraid of something as simple as... memory? "What's going on? Why do I keep ending up here?" 

Thor reaches up and streaks a finger's worth of mud down the length of Loki's nose. "Because you're my little brother and I'm trying to keep you safe."

"How can I be safe if you're gone?" Loki asks, tears welling in his eyes. 

Thor smiles. "Nobody's ever really gone," he says. "They just go home."

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**********

"And you're certain if they come..."

"We can start to... we can be free, yes," Thor says, sitting beside him on the landing, legs dangling over the side. "Convince us, and we can fix it." 

Odin looks over at the man his son will become, and makes up his mind.

It doesn’t hurt, and soon, Odin is staring down at... at his body, hanging by the end of a rope.

“Well,” Odin says, clearing his throat, massaging his neck though he feels no pain there. “Does it... does this get any easier?”

“It does. It will,” comes Frigga’s voice, and Odin feels her arm slip into his own. “But it needs to get worse first before it gets better.”

“It does,” Thor agrees. “Now we wait.”

“Luckily for you, you won’t have to wait for long,” Frigga consoles. It isn’t much, but at least there’s that.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**************

“—to get him to a hospital. He’s had two fucking seizures already. I’m not waiting for a third one.”

Thor blinks blearily, entire body aching. He feels sensitive and sore in places he doesn’t even recognize—and it only occurs to him a minute later that it isn’t a physical ache. 

No, it’s deeper than that. 

It feels as though he’s being put together, and the parts that he’s lost feel new and uncoordinated, but familiar nonetheless. It hurts, but it feels like he’s mending. It feels like he’s getting better. 

“—on their way. If you think we can get him to the car, though, we can—“

Thor doesn’t hear the rest of Heimdall and Loki’s conversation. 

No, he’s consumed by fear.

It’s standing there.

It’s standing /right/ there, in the corner, just looking at him. 

The skinless face... the bony hand... the charred entirety...

The Inside Out Man walks towards Thor, and he can’t warn Loki—too petrified, too scared, and soon the monster is offering its hand.

Thor is trapped in the gravity well of the Inside Out Man's abandonless grin, unable to look away, but suddenly, the fear... subsides. Recognition dawns. Thor reaches out to take the creature's hand.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
*********

Thor is screaming, he's screaming because Loki is unconscious on the floor and mom is pouring gasoline all over and then she grabs him. She grabs him by the arm and drags him to the basement, ignoring his cries of pain when she wrenches his shoulder and all but yanks him down the rest of the stairs.

Thor keeps screaming and crying even as Frigga assures him that he'll be fine, that Loki and Hela and Odin will be fine. That everything will be okay. That things will start over if she does this.

"And we can try again, my love," she says, pouring the gasoline over her head as though she's taking a decadent shower. 

"Mom, no, please, no! Mom! Mom stop!" Frigga lights the match, and stands there, frozen.

"What?" Thor asks when he realizes time has stopped. 

"You're going to have a hard life after this," says a voice from behind him. Thor, startled out of his hysteria, turns in surprise, then shrieks. 

The Inside Out Man sighs.

"I'm such an idiot. I should have realized how scary I would look afterwards. Look, Thor, it's... things won't be easy for you from now on. But if you keep going, you'll have a chance to end all of this when you're a grownup." 

Thor shakes his head wordlessly, tears streaming down his cheeks, his mouth open in a silent scream. 

"It'll be okay. I'll make sure Loki doesn't remember the scary stuff. And you - I'll... I'm sorry. I'm sorry about what will happen to you, but at least you won't remember this part."

"Which part?" Thor asks, and the ceiling collapses on top of him.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

NOW  
***************

Memories are fickle things.

Memories are fickle things, and time is relative.

Those are the only two things Thor can claim he really, truly knows are true as he tries to ignore Heimdall and Loki knocking at the door of the bathroom, asking if he’s okay.

He isn’t—not really. 

The reflection that stares back at him in the mirror is not his own as he’s come to know it, but he knows it all the same.

He knows the awful grin, the unevenly sized eyes, one seeming larger because it has no lid, the other nearly seared shut. He knows the place where his missing nose should be in, the stubs of red that should be his ears. Thor turns away from the mirror and comes face to face with the Inside Out Man.

“There’s more, isn’t there?”

“There is, but I think you already know what happens.”

Thor swallows thickly, shaking all over, but this time—/this time/—it’s entirely just because of the withdrawal. No fear. No anger. Nothing at all, besides anticipation, confusion. No, the shaking... it’s all just his body trying to fight against breaking down without all the shit it’s come to depend on. 

“We—I need to tell him.”

“You can try. It isn’t going to stop anything, and it isn’t going to change anything.”

Thor shakes his head. “Show me first. That night. Something else happened that night. I can tell you’re keeping it from me.” 

“Think. You know what happened that night. You remember what we did.”

Thor doesn’t.

He really, truly doesn’t. 

Until he does. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**************

Thor wakes up, but he can’t see anything, and at first he’s afraid he’s gone blind.

“I’m here, my love,” comes mama’s voice, and it takes a second for Thor to place it, to feel where she is. “That’s right, I’m right here.”

Thor opens his eyes and finds mama standing over him, her face has that sad smile on, and her head and entire body are framed by an orange light. At first, Thor thinks it’s sunlight, and she’s waking him up to start the day. 

The sounds break the trance, and Thor stands up with his mother’s help, and he wonders why he’s in the cellar. It registers in his head a split second later that outside the cellar is burning—the basement is an inferno.

“Mama, what—“

“Hush, my darling. You’re okay. You’re safe with mama.” 

Thor steps away from her with a confused frown, and his ankle collides with something on the ground. A quick look shows Thor... himself. 

His blonde hair, his skin, his eyes and nose and mouth.

“Mama...? Mama what’s... I don’t understand—mama what—“

The loud crash startles Thor, and he jumps and backs away as people in thick looking outfits come down to the basement, carrying fire extinguishers that coat everything in foam, throwing balls that explode into foam—everything.

“Jesus… Steve! The kid—there’s a kid!” One of them yells, and Thor watches as the pair make their way towards his... his body? Him? He watches as one of them picks him up, limp and unyielding. “Get him out and to EMTs ASAP.”

“Hey...” Thor says weakly, “hey stop! Let go of me!”

“Come, my little spark,” Frigga says, offering her hand. “Don’t be afraid.”

Thor can’t help it—he is afraid. He... he knows this happened, but he also doesn’t—

“Come. It will all make sense.”

Thor swallows thickly, taking her hand and allowing mama to lead him. They go up, beyond the flames that don’t burn them, beyond the kitchen, catching up to the firefighter right at the front door, where he sprints all the way out.

Loki is out on the lawn, and so is dad and Hela. 

Thor watches as the men crowd around his body, as Loki screams and cries, as Hela sobs, as tears run down dad’s cheeks. Loki looks up at the house and frowns, and Hela does too, and they both look... frightened. 

Thor makes to go to them, but mama holds him back. 

“Mama—“

“It’s not your job to take care of them anymore, my darling.”

Thor tries to protest, tries to pull away from Frigga's hand, but her grip is strong and he is so small, so weak. 

Then something starts to happen. Movement at the door, but nobody seems to notice besides Thor. "No!" he screams when he realizes the Inside Out Man is coming towards him. 

Across the yard, Loki, awake and alert now, yells and points at the creature coming towards Thor's body. "It's him!" his little brother shrieks. "He's going to hurt Thor! Help! Help him!"

Thor tries, again, to pull away. To run to comfort Loki. Instead Frigga holds him still and makes him watch. Makes him watch as the Inside Out Man splits in two. He watches as one part reaches towards Thor, drawing a shape out of him, putting it beside the other part. Then, the split off man flows into Thor like a mist. 

"Got a pulse!" one of the EMTs exclaims. "He's alive!" 

The Thor standing in the yard is gone. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
************

Waking up in the hospital feeling like pieces of him had been ripped out. 

Wandering into the yard at night to stare sightlessly at the sky. 

The ghosts in every mirror and around every corner, the fear of everything that permeated life at Heimdall's.

The hospital stays.

The medications and the hushed talk of brain damage and delusion. 

The constant deja vu.

Being able to know what people are thinking and feeling.

And then the drugs that took all of that away, that he used as his lifeline for more than half of his entire existence. 

Or, rather, for half of a half of his entire existence, because this has all happened before. He's stood right here and remembered these exact memories and he's done it before. 

He wonders if he is cursed to do it over and over again.

He doesn’t want to.

“Wake up!” Loki is yelling, “Thor, wake up!”

...and suddenly he’s back in the bathroom, staring up at his little brother’s worried face. The aches and pains of his soul—so broken—get mirrored by the aches and pains of his body. It’s all Thor can do not to start sobbing right there and then.

“Can you get up?”

Thor shakes his head, letting Loki pull him up. Heimdall comes in as well to support him from the other side. They help him get downstairs, help him get out the front doors, help him get towards the car.

Loki arranges him in the back seat, tucking some blankets around him. Thor lolls his head to the side, looking out into the lawn where he had come back to life, once. He swears he can almost see the silhouettes of the figures from that night—sees the phantoms move exactly as he’d witnessed them moving. 

“You sit tight back here, and we’ll get you to a hospital real soon. Heimdall managed to clear the road. It’s safe to drive now, too. So you just hang on, alright, Thor?” Loki is saying, brushing hair from his face.

The gesture is tender, full of concern—love.

Thor soaks it in.

It’s been so long since he’s felt this from his brother. He knows it won’t last. This has happened before, after all, but it serves to remind him of the reason why any of this was worth it. 

“Alright. Thanks. You know I love you, right, Lo?”

“We’ll talk about that later.”

Thor is a little afraid there won't be a later for them to talk, but now it hardly matters. Now he understands why he's felt so fractured and fragmented ever since that night. Mostly, though, he's grateful to get away from that place, to get some space, some breathing room, to figure out how to live with the knowledge he now possesses. 

He isn't sure anyone will believe him. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
************

"I never want to hear from you ever again," Hela snarls down at him. She's pale, a crimson cut down her cheek a physical reminder of her loss. 

Thor blinks. It's all he really can do at the moment. Everything feels fuzzy and far away.

"Didn't we already do this?" he asks. 

"We're not the only ones trapped there," says the faceless child beside him. "You're still learning, we gave you the pieces, but you're still putting them together. Loki will be too." 

"I didn't know she was pregnant," Thor admits as Hela storms away, never to speak to him again until he's had his... premonition. 

"She hadn't told anyone yet, besides her husband," the him strung out on meth with the sliced open wrists after Jane's departure informs him. 

"She still blames me." 

"She'll learn the truth someday," the child promises.

“Why are we here then?” Thor asks tiredly.

He’s not sure he likes being tucked away in memories. There aren’t plenty of good ones, and the few things that are, are touched and tainted with deep melancholy. Sadness and regret mixing into them that he has never had many more of those carefree days. Never cared to make more for himself.

Thor realizes none of them have answered him, so he asks it again.

“Why are we here?”

“Why indeed?” The Inside Out Man asks. “You’ve got the driver’s seat. We’re just here for the rest of the ride.”

Thor sighs.

Jane comes soon after and she’s cooing at him, caring for him. Thor wonders how she had it in her to stay by his side for so long after. He wonders how they both even clicked in the first place.

The him right after this particular incident shakes his head,

“We were never short of people who cared. It’s just that we couldn’t.”

“We didn’t have enough of us to care.”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
***************

“It’s normal for people like Thor to have depressive episodes after stopping,” the doctor who sees them says sympathetically, adjusting the glasses on his face. “Given what you’ve told me, it’s expected even. A loss of a parent, aggravated by past trauma, and withdrawal on top of that?”

Loki knows what the man is getting at, knows Heimdall buys into it completely, but it just isn’t normal for Thor to be this /quiet/. It isn’t normal for Thor to be this listless, this stationary... this sad.

He reaches out and takes Thor’s hand, making his brother’s eyes slide towards him momentarily.

“Is there anything we—is there anything /I/ can do to help, Thor?”

"Do you still love me?" Thor asks, voice flat, eyes blank. He's even stopped fidgeting, which Loki is fairly certain he has never seen. Thor has always been in constant motion, moving from one thing to another to fill whatever hole inside of him he was trying to fill.

Just like Loki had, until he had found a reason not to. Someone who had given him a second chance and a leg up. Thor... Loki isn't sure Thor will ever have anyone else stick around, not if he isn't able to... 

"We can talk about that when you're feeling better," Loki replies instead of delving into the complicated feelings Thor's question stirs in him. 

Thor frowns deeply, pushing himself upright. "I want to talk about it now," he insists. 

Loki lowers his head and pinches the bridge of his nose. "Thor. You're going through alcohol withdrawal. You're not thinking rationally."

Loki edges closer again, reaches his fingers out to once again clasp Thor's. "You scared the /shit/ out of me this weekend. All of us."

Loki hates not knowing what to say, but he currently doesn't, so he lapses into silence when Thor doesn't respond. 

"It's to be expected," the doctor reiterates, giving a glance at Thor's vitals. "I'll be back to give you some Ativan in about twenty minutes so you can get some sleep."

Loki doesn't miss the look of fear that crosses Thor's face in that moment.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**********

Thor looks up as his little brother calls his name, then sputters as mud splats all over his face. There’s a delighted shriek, and peals of laughter all around him. Thor wipes his face, seeing Loki, his little face scrunched up in laughter, mama beside him, covering her mouth and laughing daintily as well.

Dad is chuckling, and Hela is howling with mirth. 

“This was a good day,” he mentions, already feeling the presence behind him. “Why here?”

“This is his favorite memory of us,” says the older version of him. “One of his last memories of us as a family.”

“Can I stay here for a while?”

He hears the smile in the Inside Out Man’s voice even though he sounds like he’d gargled glass, “Of course.”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
************

“What do you mean you want me to go back there with you?” Loki asks incredulously, shaking his head when Thor only looks back at him with that blank, empty look. “You... I don’t get you. You begged me not to take you back when I came to get you, begged to leave when we got stuck, and now you’re begging me to /go back/?”

“Yes. There’s something we need to do. Stuff we need to talk about.”

“Why not talk about them here? And there’s nothing left to do there. You should know that, with how much you wandered that house hunting for ghosts.”

Thor winces, but gathers himself back together.

“Please just trust me. I... I need you to come back to the house with me.”

“Why?”

“I just—“

“/Why/, Thor?”

“You promise you’ll try to hear me out?”

“Just spit it out already.”

His brother looks like he’s getting himself ready to face Loki’s wrath. Loki finds indifference much more appealing after Thor has finished his little story.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
*********

"Stop making up stories," Hela snaps, making Thor wince and Loki look down at his plate. Heimdall says something soft but ultimately ineffective. 

"They're not stories," Thor insists, gripping his fork so hard his hand hurts. "They really happened! You were there!"

Hela snorts. "Sounds like somebody needs his meds adjusted again," she says. 

"I'm not crazy," Thor protests, but this time it's weak, uncertain of his own truth, now. "Please believe me."

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
********

"Please believe me," Thor pleads, grabbing both of Loki's hands in his own. He looks at Loki steadily across the space between them, no drugs or alcohol clouding his eyes. 

But that doesn't mean his brother is well.

Loki pulls away and shakes his head, crossing his arms over his chest. The body language should be clear enough for Thor. They aren’t going back to the house, and Loki... doesn’t believe him.

“Loki...”

He shakes his head again, turning to look at Heimdall. The older man should back him up in this one—Thor, despite being able to get sober there, only managed to do that because he ran out of drugs. Despite that, his delusions and hallucinations, his /madness/ got worse.

Worse still, he managed to... managed to convince Loki to take some pills. 

Loki doesn’t blame Thor entirely, since it was his own fault too for caving, but still—he’s starting to think this is his brother just wanting a get-high buddy again. 

“Thor, I need to go back to New York. I have a job there. I—I have a life there, and I’m actually happy.” 

“But mom and dad—“

“Are dead. And they’d want us to move on.”

Thor shakes his head. "Move on to what?" he asks, brokenly. "You have your life. Hela has hers. What about me?"

Here, Heimdall does step in. "If you stay sober, you're welcome to stay with me until you're back on your feet," he offers. 

Thor scowls deeply, and Loki can see a tantrum brewing. "I was never /on/ my feet to begin with!" he snaps. "I don't need your charity and I sure as hell don't need your pity. If you're not going to help me, I'll figure it out myself."

Though he's still pale and shakey from the detox stay, Thor manages to slam Heimdall's front door with enough force to shake the walls. 

Loki looks down at the table. "After all this, he still doesn't...."

"You need to go easier on him." Loki looks up at the familiar yet surprising voice. He's back in the garden, a handful of mud in his hand, Thor's chubby child's face looking up at him, trusting, but with an age behind his eyes that Loki fears. "He's trying. He told you the truth, and I think you know that, deep down, don't you, brother?" 

Loki swallows, nods, but says, "I need to go back to New York. I have a life there." 

Child-Thor looks sad, which almost makes Loki buckle. "Just answer the phone when we call," the little boy requests. 

"..... call for a wellness check if we don't hear from him by the end of the week," Loki comes back to. 

"Sorry. What was that?" He had thought being away from the house and on his way back to his life would have made these little episodes subside. 

"I was just saying if we don't hear from Thor by the end of the week..."

Loki nods, and a little voice in his head says /answer the phone when he calls/. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
*********

Loki looks down at his caller ID and winces. Thor again, for the fifth time tonight. He isn't sure what his brother is up to, but his voicemail messages are increasingly incoherent, and there's noise in the background suggesting Thor is at a bar or something like that. 

Loki doesn't have time for that, for Thor just deciding that he's going to call Loki less than two hours after being all but thrown out of Fandral's. Probably going to act like nothing happened and ask for a ride home, not that Loki is currently in any condition to drive, himself. 

He lets the call go to voicemail yet again, along with the next two. 

The next call, though, he answers, just out of curiosity. He has every intention of hanging up immediately after whatever nonsense Thor comes out with. "/What/?" he snaps into the phone. "Quit blowing up my phone. I don't want to talk to you." 

Thor's words are so slurred and slow and turned around that Loki really has to strain to understand, eventually, that Thor is saying, "Mom was right. I'm gonna go."

Panic crawls up Loki's spine. Fandral had given Thor enough fentanyl to kill several elephants. If he had taken too much - if he - oh. Fuck.

"Where are you?" he demands.

Thor doesn’t answer for a while, and Loki can only hear heavy breathing. The panic triples, and Loki gets up from the couch, where Fandral is still blissed out and drooling.

“Thor, where are you?”

His brother lets out some huffing breaths, /laughing/.

“I dunno. But I’ll be home soon. Real soon.”

“Thor, I’m serious. Where the fuck are you?” Loki all but yells into the phone, the fear making him lose his grip on the anger from earlier. “I’ll come get you.”

Another long pause. 

“Love you, Lo.”

The line goes dead.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
******************

“Seriously, Loki, are you okay?” Tony asks for the umpteenth time as he bangs around in the kitchen. “You’re moodier than usual.”

Loki glances up from the latest of Odin's journals. He knows it's just Thor getting into his head again, but since getting his hands on these documents, he's convinced himself there are answers within them. That, or he's going just as crazy as his brother. 

"I'm fine, I just -" He sighs, pushes the book away. "Family stuff." He hasn't told Tony many details beyond the basics: mom died when he was young, dad in his grief sent them to live with Heimdall. Hela is an author and Thor is a drug addict. That's all he wants Tony to know. 

"You realize everyone has 'family stuff,' right?" Tony asks, still banging around making omlettes. "You don't have to be so secretive about it." 

"It's - complicated," Loki attempts, but his boyfriend is ridiculously perceptive. 

"I'm good at complicated," Tony shoots back. "Lay it on me." 

Loki shakes his head, the cold hand of grief squeezing his heart. "Not right now. Someday. But not right now." 

"When, then?" 

Loki looks up and sees - oh, he's back in the garden, and there's Thor standing there. He's not a Thor Loki is familiar with; his hair brushes his shoulderblades, his face thin, bones jutting, sores on his cheeks and forehead and blood pouring down his wrists. 

"What the fuck?" Loki can think of nothing else to say besides that. "Where's my brother?" This is the wrong Thor. 

The Wrong Thor shakes his head. "We're all your brother, and we all just want to protect you. Answer when we call." 

".... so I don't really see what the big deal is, Lokes." 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
*********

"I really don't see what the big deal is, Lo," Thor scoffs, twirling a syringe around his fingers as if it's just a pencil. "When something stops working, you try something else, right?"

Loki feels sick. There's something wrong about this, he knows it, but Thor sounds so certain, so confident. "Have you tried it already?"

Maybe if Thor has already tried it, it's okay.

Sure enough, Thor nods. 

"It's the best thing I've ever felt in my entire life," he admits, breathless, "and I never want to feel any other way."

Loki trusts his brother. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
*****************

Loki doesn’t trust his brother.

He used to, but after the accident, and after he’d gotten a chance to think about and reevaluate his life when he’d been getting sober, he’d realized that perhaps Thor wasn’t the one who had his best interests at heart. No, Thor wasn’t the best person to model, or entrust his safety with.

But...

But—

Loki can’t deny that the opposite was also true. He also wasn’t the person Thor should’ve entrusted with his own safety. Neither of them were capable of taking care of themselves, let alone each other. 

He’s sure he still isn’t capable of taking care of his brother. Loki definitely doesn’t want to be responsible for Thor, even if he feels like he is. Heimdall calling him now to update him... Loki doesn’t really know how he feels about it.

He isn’t Thor’s keeper.

“He says he’s gone back to New Mexico,” Heimdall reports, but he sounds like he has more to say.

“But?”

“I don’t believe him. I’m concerned about what he’s up to by himself. He doesn’t trust me.”

“You want me to call him.”

“Yes.”

Loki pinches the bridge of his nose, glancing at the files he still needs to go through for Tony. 

Life has almost gone back to normal for him. He’s spoken to Hela a couple of times already, but Thor still hasn’t called. Granted, Thor didn’t tell Loki exactly that he would, but Loki has been having odd dreams about his brother—always in the garden, but he always looked different—telling him to answer when “we” call.

“It’s been a month, Heimdall, and you’ve been calling him every week. Evidently, he’s fine. He’s probably gone back to his routine...”

Silence on the other end.

“Your brother needs you, Loki. As I’ve said, he doesn’t trust me, but he trusts /you/. Just... think about it, alright? Take care of yourself.”

"Yeah, I'll think about it," Loki murmurs, turning the thought over in his head as he hangs up. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
*********

He tells Heimdall he's staying with friends for the weekend. He technically is. Thor is his friend, and Fandral is his friend. They feel even more than friends once Loki has had a little of what they both offer. 

He feels even /better/ once Fan gives him the signal, once it's time to push Thor over the edge from pleasantly buzzed to thoroughly wasted, so he and Loki can have some privacy. 

Loki sashays over to the couch, syringe in once hand, a bottle of tequila in the others. "Shots, and a shot," Loki offers with a goofy smile. 

Thor looks up too, but his face is far too young. He's far too small.

"I'm close to getting it all together," Thor says. "Answer when we call." 

Loki huffs and jabs Thor with the needle, if only to stop his cryptic pronouncements. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
*********

"You're close," one of him says. They're not all reintegrated, and Thor isn't sure they will be, but they all seem to have found him, at least. Every piece of him that's ever chipped off. 

There are an awful lot of them.

There’s the faceless child, who he now knows told Hela stories when they were younger. He’d never manifested to her as he does to Thor, though, the fear of rejection permeating even into that innocent part of himself.

There’s the one that always stays in the garden, tongue stained with the color of nightshade. It’s the one that always greets Loki when his brother is tucked away.

There’s the part of him that has the slack face, eyes blank, no expression at all—that one foams at the mouth when it tries to talk, so Thor knows when that one broke off, at least.

There’s the one with its wrists torn open, blood dripping from them in rivulets of deep crimson. He remembers doing that after Jane left.

There’s one that keeps wailing in the attic, hiding away from the rest—Thor doesn’t like that one, it’s a part of him that broke off when his dignity was taken.

And then there’s the Inside Out Man. 

It’s the only one Thor doesn’t remember—and he knows why, now. Or at least he thinks he knows, and it’s the part of him that made Thor realize how he can break the cycle. 

“I’m not ready yet,” Thor admits, and it’s nothing but the complete truth.

He isn’t ready.

He doesn’t know if he’ll ever be ready.

"You'll never be ready," the Inside Out Man tells him. "Even at that moment, I had - we had - doubts. But it will. It will, I promise, fix everything."

Thor isn't sure he trusts himself.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
********

Thor doesn't trust himself. He wishes he could, wishes he could know for certain that what is wrong in his head is just that - in his head. But his mind plays tricks on him, always. 

"You experienced something very traumatic," the hospital's psychologist tells him. He doesn't know yet that it will be his last mental hospital stay, but he has a feeling. "And it's understandable that your mind has developed ways to cope with that."

Thor remains silent, because there's something else in the room with them and he doesn't want to say anything because if he does, they'll make him stay here longer. They'll make him take the medicine that pulls him apart, and he already feels stretched too thin. 

"I just wanna be normal," he manages to lament. "That's all. I just wanna feel normal."

“I imagine you do,” the older man says sympathetically. 

Thor makes sure he doesn’t look at the corner where the Inside Out Man is standing.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**************

Heimdall tears his gaze away from the corner as his phone chimes that his call hadn’t gotten through again. He sighs, swiping his thumb against the screen and pressing the lock before he pinches the bridge of his nose. 

He’d talked to Thor last week, and while he can’t just leave at the drop of a hat, he truly wants to even if the younger man had assured him he was fine. Heimdall has cared for Odin’s children since that fateful night, and he knows when something isn’t right, even if he’s not sure as to what.

With Thor, he’s more inclined to want to hop into the car and make sure.

The last time he’d forgotten to check in with Thor after a week, he’d gotten a call from the hospital.

Heimdall doesn’t want another call like that, so after another couple of minutes of reading through one of Odin’s journals—something Loki has given up on—he tries again.

This time, Thor answers. His voice is sluggish, which Heimdall had expected.

"Sorry, couldn' find my phone," he says, cutting off with a harsh cough. "I'm okay, everything's fine." 

"You don't sound fine," Heimdall points out, though Thor rarely sounds fine. Still, something is twisting inside him, urging him to press. "Where are you?"

"Ahh, uh, I tol' you, I went back t'New Mexico," Thor protests, then, as if he's pulled the phone away from himself, Heimdall hears Thor hiss, "Shut up. Leave me alone for /five minutes/."

"Thor?" Heimdall prompts. His ward is certainly not back in New Mexico. He isn't sure how he knows, but he does.

"We're fine," Thor snaps, and hangs up. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**********

"Thor." 

"Thor."

"Thor, wake up."

Thor moans and cracks open crusted-over eyes to see Heimdall looking down at him. He hears Loki shifting in the bathtub behind him. Whoops. 

"Uh," is the only thing his brain can supply to his mouth for the moment. 

Heimdall stands there with his arms crossed over his chest, his silent disappointment worse than any anger he could have thrown at them. "Get yourself and your brother cleaned up. He has school."

"We could have been more," Thor hears, and jerks his head to the side, seeing another of his many selves sitting on the edge of the sink. "If we had been allowed to stay in school, if we had -"

"What good would that have done?" post-Jane Thor asks, blood drip-drip-dripping out of his cupped hands onto the tile floor. "We would have just gotten in trouble at school too."

"I wanted to go to school," the child whimpers. 

"Go away," Thor whispers as Loki regains consciousness in the bathtub, his clothes soiled with piss and vomit. Thor's aren't in a much better state. "Please go away."

\- - - - - - - - - - 

NOW  
***********

Loki startles awake with his brother’s name on his lips, his back and neck soaked with sweat. He glances at the clock and sees that it's three in the morning. It’s the third time this has happened in two weeks, and he’s tempted to reach for his phone to call Thor just to reassure himself that his brother is fine.

Well... not /fine/, but normal. Or... not that either, but still alive. 

He’s both worried sick, and angry that Thor has put him in this position. 

Loki knows the floodgates will open again if he calls and gets evidence that Thor is just back on the heroin train again, but at the same time, he can’t take /not/ knowing. It’s bad because he doesn’t know which is bothering him more, though waking up three times in the middle of the night is a good indication.

He still hesitates, though.

Loki grabs his phone anyway, brings up his contacts list, hovering over Thor’s number.

In the end, he doesn’t call.

Not now, anyways.

Maybe in the morning.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
****************

“Please don’t tell them,” Thor begs, looking straight at Heimdall from his hospital bed. “Please, please don’t tell them.”

“They still care about you.”

Thor barks out a laugh, looking away—partly because he doesn’t believe Heimdall still thinks that, but mostly to hide the telling sheen he's sure his eyes are taking. 

He can’t believe he’d failed.

Again.

“They do.”

“The last time this happened, they both lost everything. I’m just sorry I still didn’t get it right this time.”

"Thor," Heimdall says with a sigh. "Do you - you can come home, if you would like." 

Thor shakes his head sadly. "I can't go home," he says. "Not yet." 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
********

Thor chews on his thumbnail and looks up at the empty windows of the house. The house isn't empty, it only looks that way. 

He's come back here every night since Odin's funeral, standing in the garden staring up at the house, trying to get up the courage to go inside. 

To finish what was started. To do what he is /supposed/ to do. 

But he can't yet. He doesn't have all the answers yet. 

"If you wait until you have all the answers, you're never going to get off your ass and /do/ anything," Post-Jane Thor says, and the one who foams at the mouth nods in agreement, the pink froth on his lips bubbling forth.

“Would that really be so bad?” Thor hedges, knowing that yes, it really /could be/ that bad.

But—and there’s always this that stops him—what if... what if it could also get better?

Besides... it doesn’t make sense. Not to him, anyways. 

They all tell him he can break the cycle if he does what he’s supposed to, but that would create a paradox. If he does what he’s supposed to, wouldn’t that mean the cycle repeats itself, and he—him, the Thor now, /his/ conscious self—would go on to become... the thing that’s telling him to do what needs to be done? Wouldn’t /not/ doing it be the correct solution to break the cycle? 

“The house doesn’t work on logic, and there is no such thing as absolute reality. There is only chaos. You should know that already,” the Inside Out Man tells him. “And we aren’t the only ones trapped in the house, either.”

Thor huffs.

“I’ve never seen mom or dad at all. I haven’t seen anyone.“

“We just want to come home,” the little one says. “All of us.”

“But what about the others? I don’t... do we really want to hurt them this way?” Thor asks, his resolve breaking. “Hela and Heimdall... Loki...”

“They’ll know the truth.”

“How?”

“We’ll tell them.”

"How?" Thor presses again. His siblings have never given any credence to his... to his gift, his curse, before this. Why would now be any different? 

The child shakes his head. "Haven't you learned anything?" he asks. "We'll bring them to the garden." 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
********

Loki freezes, his hand poised to let the glob of mud fly into Thor's face. Thor stops, too, as if surprised Loki didn't complete the action. "Aren't you gonna throw that at me?" he asks. 

Loki blinks slowly and looks around. "This is another dream. Isn't it?" He looks down at his brother. "I don't understand."

Thor nods. "I know. We'll be calling soon. Please answer." 

Loki blinks again and Thor is wiping mud from his face and laughing, scooping up his own handful, a playful glint in his blue eyes. Loki shrieks in laughter and loses himself to childhood. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
********

"H'lo? If this isn't about the end of the world, we're sleeping," Tony says into the phone, glancing at the clock on the nightstand. Ugh, why, /why/, would anyone be calling at three in the goddamn morning. 

"Loki? Is Loki there?" a male voice comes over the phone. Tony recognizes it from the voicemails.

"Thor. Hey, hi. I don't know if we've met. Tony Stark. Hi. Anyway, Loki's sleeping right now, if you want me to give him a message or something." Tony is pretty sure he doesn't want Loki under Thor's influence again.

"Uh. I really. Uh. Need to talk to him," Thor stutters. "Please?"

“Like I said, he’s sleeping,” Tony says into the phone, moving out of the bed slowly so as not to disturb the other man, leaving the room. “What’s up? I’ll pass the message on as soon as he’s awake, I promise.”

“I just—“ Thor starts, voice rising a little, then seems to think better of it and backtracks. “It’s... it’s really important. I need to talk to him. Please.”

“Important how? I’m sure I can help you out right now if you need-“

“I need to talk to my brother!”

Tony lets that hang for a little while, and soon enough, Thor is apologizing for raising his voice. He sighs, shaking his head as he pads to the kitchen to grab a glass of water. Though he doesn’t want Loki anywhere near his brother, Tony kind of feels for the man—he’d even thought about offering to fund Thor’s treatment as he’d done with Loki’s, since Loki does care about the man, but this...

“Listen, if it’s money you need, I can send you enough right now to either dope yourself up for life, or buy yourself a spot at the most successful treatment centers—plane ticket included.”

“I—wait is... is that really... is that what he thinks we’d be calling about?”

Tony pauses. 

He’s sure he’s seen Loki this tense only a handful of times before, and it was always when the stray call or two came from Thor looking for cash.

“Well... yeah.”

“Oh. I... oh.”

“Yup.”

“Okay. Could you uh... could you hang up, then? I’ll leave him a message.”

Tony grinds his teeth a little, resisting the urge to groan, impatient, “No, it’s cool, you can tell me.”

“It’s personal. Don’t pick it up or listen to it please.”

The man hangs up, and Tony waits for a minute, then one more, then sighs when the phone doesn’t start buzzing again. He grabs his water, heads back to bed, and puts Loki’s phone on silent mode. He’ll tell Loki about it in the morning.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Thor stares down at the phone in his hand, heart twisting in his chest as tears fill his eyes.

“He didn’t answer...”

“I’m sorry,” the Inside Out Man says, his voice conveying full sympathy. 

“We tried,” the child adds, also sounding sorry for him.

Thor feels the tears drip down his cheeks, sniffling a bit as he tries to collect himself. He deserves it, and it’s probably for the best anyways. If Loki knew what he was about to do, if Thor slipped and told him what he was about to do, if Loki believed it and begged him not to, maybe Thor would have changed his mind.

Everyone would remain trapped here forever.

It’s... for the best.

“It’s okay... there’s voice mail. And I deserve this,” Thor declares, then dials Loki’s number one more time.

He hopes the Tony guy won’t get in the way this time. When it goes over to voice mail, Thor has to take some deep breaths again before he can actually speak.

“Hey, little brother... I don’t know if you’re awake and just don’t want to talk to me but I... I just need you to listen, okay? I just need you to listen...”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
*********

The handful of mud slips through Loki's fingers. Hela and Thor are laughing. Frigga is smiling. Across the yard, Odin is mowing the lawn, the smell of freshly cut grass overwhelming Loki's senses. 

This is his favorite day. He's glad he comes back here, because this is his favorite day. He knows he comes here a lot, and he doesn't know why, but it's a nice place to be. 

Thor breaks off from the game he's playing with Hela.

"Loki! Didn't you hear me calling you?" he asks. 

Loki shakes his head. This hasn't happened before. He's not sure what's going on.

"I think I was asleep," he explains. 

Thor nods, his small face solemn. "That's okay. We left you a message. Please listen." He reaches out and grabs Loki's hands, ignoring the mud smearing all over his own hands. "I love you, Lo." 

"I love you too, dummy," Loki replies. Thor brightens at that, then gives Loki's arm a poke.

"Tag. You're it!"

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
********

Hela sees Thor's name pop up on the caller ID and decides to just turn her phone on silent mode. He's probably just going to ask for money, or wants to try to convince her of more insanity. 

No, she's done. After the funeral, she had decided, no more. Never again. Thor has made his own bed, now he gets to lie in it. 

She sets the phone down on her nightstand and goes back to sleep. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
********

"Why don't you have a face?" Hela asks the little boy who tells her stories.

The little boy points towards her, and Hela frowns, not quite understanding what he means. She tilts her head to the side as she studies him, then, as though a lightbulb has gone off in her head, she realizes something.

“Wait... this isn’t... you weren’t a little boy. You were a woman with beautiful long hair!” She exclaims, brow furrowing deeply as she recalls her imaginary friend as she actually remembers her being.

Long black hair, skin pale as porcelain, nails painted black and—wait. That’s what /she/ looks like.

The faceless little boy claps his hands, and Hela can feel the giddy excitement coming from him. The happiness at her discovery.

“What are you...” Hela starts, then stops herself short as she takes in the other features.

Blonde hair.

Sun-kissed skin.

The red matching pajamas.

Hela swears she can almost see Thor’s young features on the blank canvas the boy has for a face, but before she can say anything, his voice is in her head.

“I hope you enjoyed my stories. Not too bad, was I? Maybe I could’ve been an author too. Anyways, don’t worry. I’m okay and everything will be alright now,” the boy gets up from where he’s sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, jogging over towards her and embracing her, not minding the scalding water one bit. “Fenris can’t wait to meet you, but for now, it’s time to wake up, big sister. I love you.”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**************

Hela wakes up sobbing uncontrollably, and it takes her a full two minutes and two tablets of Xanax to calm down enough to notice that her phone is buzzing. She fully expects to find Thor’s name again, but instead, she finds that it’s Heimdall’s.

Heart in her throat and breaths still stuttering, she answers.

“Heimdall?”

There’s sniffling on the other end, which immediately puts her edge—makes her reach for her pill bottle again. It takes her old guardian a bit of time to collect himself.

“Something has—it’s... it’s about your brother...” he says, voice breaking on the last word, “it’s Thor.”

Hela books the next flight home. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**********

"No! Mom! No!" Thor tries to pull his arm out of Frigga's grasp, but it's too hard, she's holding fast, not letting him go. 

If he doesn't escape, Loki might die! Hela might die! Dad might die! Frigga might die! He... he might die. 

But he can't get free, he can't escape, and he's being dragged down the basement stairs, crying in pain and terror. 

Thor looks up, and sees a man at the top of the stairs, holding a gas canister in one hand and a glass bottle in the other. "Help!" he shrieks. "Help me!" 

The man takes the stairs down with heavy steps, acting like he doesn't see Thor at all. 

"Help me!" Thor sobs. "Help me!" 

The man doesn't reply, simply takes a drink from the glass bottle and starts pouring the gasoline. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
***********

The smell of gas wars with the smell of whiskey in Thor's senses. He knows what he needs to do, but he doesn't want to be sober for it. The others don't seem to mind that he can barely make it to where he needs to go. 

All that matters is what he does when he gets there. Thor takes one last drink, and chuckles. His last, truly. Then, he starts pouring the gasoline.

He's already made his way through the house. This is the last of five gas cans, the rest emptied throughout the rest of the house as his mother and father follow him and tell him where to pour. 

And now he stands in the basement, the stench of his own fate making his eyes water. He feels like he needs to say something. 

"Everything will be okay," the Inside Out Man says for him. 

Thor lights the match. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
************

Time stops when the pain starts. It blocks him from it and allows him the clarity he needs. He sees his younger self notice him, start to scream. 

He sees Frigga blazing alongside him, holding her hand out for him to take. He does, and they stand together, burning, watching as the firefighters carry young Thor's small body out of the house. 

"Now," Frigga urges. Thor looks down at his own charred remains and nods, following himself out into the yard.

He heads up towards the front door, looks beyond it to where his family are huddled together, just a couple of feet away from where the paramedics are working on his body. The ghost of his younger self is there, Frigga holding him back, and Thor walks over to where his family is at.

He ignores the group of men around his own body this time, and heads straight for Loki, who looks absolutely terrified, tears steaming down his face, but not because of /him/. No, Loki is looking at his younger self, the one the paramedics are trying to save.

“It’ll be alright now, little brother.”

Loki’s head snaps up towards him, and his face morphs into one of fear and confusion.

“It’s time to wake up, Loki.”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
****************

Loki gasps and shoots upright, awake again, drenched in sweat again, heart pounding in his chest again. He’d been having a pleasant dream, and then suddenly it was... it was that.

He turns towards the clock, half expecting it to be three in the morning again, but is surprised when he finds it’s actually half past six. Tony is still snoring on the other side of the bed, and Loki buried his face in his hands.

What the hell was that?

Loki sighs, trying to shake it off, then reaches over for his phone.

His eyes grow wide when he sees how many missed calls he’s gotten from Heimdall, and how many he’s gotten from Hela, too. He opens the lock and scrolls down, heart-rate skyrocketing when he finds a voice message from Thor.

What the hell has happened /now/?

Loki’s hands start shaking, but he plays Thor’s voice message first. Surely, surely his brother had just gotten too reckless with the drugs again, hadn’t he? It isn’t anything serious. It can’t be. They’d all seen each other less than two months ago and it just—

“Hey, little brother... I don’t know if you’re awake and just don’t want to talk to me, but I... I just need you to listen, okay? I just need you to listen...”

Thor pauses, Loki grips the phone tighter, eyes already filling with tears.

“I know I haven’t always been the best brother. I know I’ve failed you. More times than I can remember, I’m sure, but Loki... I always, always just wanted to protect you. Always. I was just... I was bad at it. Am bad at it. I’m sorry for that. For everything, you know? All of it. For hurting you and Hela. For that night and everything after. But I want you to know that I’ll fix it, okay? I’ll make everything better. Set things straight. Fuck, this probably isn’t making a lot of sense,” Thor laughs, a choked up sound, before he continues. “Remember that your big brother loves you, okay? Always. And when we—when you see me again, please take my hand. I promise I’ll make it better. I love you. Bye.”

Loki plays the message twice more, the dread he had woken up with building in intensity until he finally, finally, checks his texts. 

'Call me. Now,' reads one from Hela. 

'Please call when you get this," the one from Heimdall is softer. 

There are no texts from Thor. With his heart in his throat and tears in his eyes, Loki shakes Tony awake. "I need you to bring me home," he chokes out. 

\---------------------  
THEN  
***********

"Where do you get the inspiration for your books?"

It's a common enough question, especially given the subject matter she writes about. "All over," she replies. "A lot of them are based on stories I heard as a child."

It's a rote response, and she isn't even sure if it's true. Something tickles the back of her mind, the edges of her memory. 

She looks down at the book she's here to do a reading of and when she looks up again, she's in the garden at the old house. 

What - 

Thor, face still round with baby fat, his blond hair flying in the wind, runs to her, arms outstretched. "I've missed you!" he cries.

"I've been here the whole time," Hela says, unsure.

Her little brother wraps his arms around her, cheek pressed onto her shoulder, his small hand petting her hair. It isn’t right. They’re supposed to be just two years apart, yet Thor feels so tiny. So much younger.

Hela blinks, a sudden wetness in her eyes as she embraces Thor back. 

“I missed you a lot.”

“I’ve been right here,” Hela reiterates, pulling away to look at Thor’s face. He’s older this time, much like how she remembers him the last time they’d seen each other, but there’s something different. “I was right here, what are you talking about?”

Thor just smiles sadly, “I’ll tell you when you’re all home.”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
***************

Loki doesn’t feel any shame when Tony splurges his money and flies them both back home as soon as Loki had requested it. He still hasn’t called either Heimdall or Hela. He can already feel it in his bones, what had happened, and he doesn’t want to hear it, honestly.

Tony’s been asking, but Loki has no answers to give. 

Not now.

Maybe not ever. 

All Loki wants to do right now is to see his brother.

To be wrong. 

He wants so much to be wrong.

He can't even explain how he knows where to go, what address to give the driver, how he just knows deep in his gut where Thor will be. 

He knows, deep in his gut, that he's too late, and when the car pulls down the long drive and Loki sees the burnt-out husk of the house, it's cemented as truth. He lets out a soft, "Oh no," and then is out of the car before it's even fully rolled to a stop.

He hears Tony calling after him, but Loki doesn't care. He doesn't care about the police tape blocking off the entrance, nor the caution signs warning of the instability of the structure. 

The smell of char and wet and death hang in the air and Loki refuses to believe it. He pushes his way through the house, towards the kitchen, calling his brother's name. Thor's body might not be here any longer, but /Thor/ might still be. 

Tony finds him fifteen minutes later, kneeling on the scorched remains of the kitchen floor, hands wrapped around the shattered pieces of a mug with a snake for a handle, weeping. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
***********

"So tell me everything about yourself, but make it interesting so I don't get bored," Tony Stark demands, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers behind his head.

Loki doesn't really know what to say. Not to this man who had not only cottoned onto what he was doing almost immediately, but had just as nearly-immediately shipped him off to rehab on Stark Industries' tab. Without even actually talking to him for more than ten minutes. 

So now he's in Stark's office, trying to figure out how he still has a job at /all/, let alone why the CEO of the company wants to know anything about him. 

"I have two siblings," he starts with, because Hela is at least successful and Thor... well, Thor is a good story to tell to explain why Loki had done what he had been doing. "My older sister writes horror novels, and my older brother lives in a trailer in New Mexico and, I don't know, sucks dick for drug money I guess." 

It's a mean thing to say, but it makes Stark bark out a laugh. "Family issues, then?" he asks. "Yeah, I got that, what else you got?"

"Tell him the truth," the Inside Out Man says from just over Stark's shoulder. "Tell him what really happened."

Loki shakes his head, lowering the hand filled with mud to his side. "I don't know what the truth is," he admits. 

Thor smiles up at him, his mouth stained with deadly nightshade. "You will," he promises.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**************

Hela looks up when the door opens, and two people come into the lobby of the mortuary. She’s still in shock, but she stands up when she sees that it’s Loki. A man she doesn’t know is leading him by the small of his back. 

Her youngest brother—her /only/ brother, now—looks like how Hela feels, and it’s all she can do to walk over and throw her arms around him. He doesn’t react for a fair bit of time, but his arms do come up around her. 

“I’m so sorry,” she tells him, not sure why she’s apologizing. “I am so, so sorry.” 

It’s apparently all Loki needs, because soon he’s pulling away. His eyes, though red and puffy, are still dry, and his face is blank. 

“I want to see him.”

Hela’s heart freezes in her chest. She and Heimdall had gone to see Thor, and...

“Oh, little brother, no you don’t. You don’t. You don’t have to see him like... like that. It’s bad.”

“I want to see him. I want to see Thor.”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

THEN  
**************

“I /want/ to /see him/!” Loki yells, his little face scrunching up in anger, fists clenched at his sides. “I wanna go to Thor!”

Heimdall sighs, and Hela hugs her knees to her chest as the two continue to argue—she wants to see Thor too, but she doesn’t want to antagonize Heimdall. They don’t know this man well, and now he’s saying they’re going to live with him, and well...

“Loki, I understand this is difficult for you, but I promise we’ll go visit Thor on the weekend. He’s still sleeping right now anyways, and you won’t—“

“I don’t care! I don’t care! I want Thor! I want my big brother!”

Hela feels a tear slip down her cheek, and she jolts when she feels someone’s hand over her own. When she turns to look, she finds herself in the garden, and Thor is there, giving her a sunny smile. 

“Please listen to him, okay?” He tells her, turning to look at little Loki, hands buried in the mud. “He’s going to need you.”

“You needed me too. I wasn’t here for you.”

Thor shrugs, “I pushed you away. Hurt you. Made it difficult to care. It’s okay, though. I forgive you. I hope you forgive me too. For everything.”

"I - of course I do," she stammers. "It wasn't your fault." It really hadn't been, none of it. Thor had been a victim as much as the rest of them. 

Thor gives her a sad smile. "I fixed it, at least," he says, then brightens and grins. "Tag," he says, tapping her arm, "You're it." 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
***********

Hela had warned him and Heimdall had pulled Tony aside to try and get the man to convince Loki not to head down here, to the morgue, to where his brother is resting. 

And if Loki concentrates really hard, he could believe that. He could believe he's just heading down the cellar stairs, or down to Fan's basement apartment, and he'll find Thor there, asleep. 

Tony's on his heels the whole way, one hand clasped tight on Loki's shoulder. When they get to the bottom, into the clean and sterile room, the mortician says, "If you're here for Thor Odinson, I would really recommend..."

"I need to see my brother," Loki says, the words leaving his mouth without his input. 

"Are you sure you want to remember him like this?" Tony asks in his ear. "Heimdall said -" 

"I don't /care/ what Heimdall said!" Loki snaps. "He's my big brother and I need to see him!" 

/Answer when we call/, all of his dreams of Thor had pleaded. And he hadn't, and now... now he's watching as a drawer is pulled out of the wall. 

The body on the table is familiar, but not because it's the brother he's known and loved more than sanity could account for.

No, it's not Thor on that table. 

It's the Inside Out Man, his skin peeled from his bones by fire, eyes milky, one wider than the other from the missing lid. The gap where a nose had been. And the bloody lipless smile that Loki realizes he has remembered and forgotten thousands of times. 

He can't help it. 

He screams.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
********************

The feet are coming nearer, dragging across the floor, and then thin, bone fingers—longer than a human’s, kind of—grips the edge of the bed. The body the feet belong to starts to bend, and a grotesque face greets both him and Thor.

Loki can’t help it.

He screams. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

NOW  
******************

Loki comes back to himself, and he’s only distantly aware that Tony is trying to turn him around, trying to get him not to look. Loki’s eyes are stuck. 

“No—no, no, no, no—that’s not—that isn’t... it can’t be. It can’t be—“

“Lo, shh, shh. It’s okay. Let’s head back up. Come on, it’s okay, you don’t have to keep—“

“That’s /not/ Thor—that—it—“ Loki stutters, trying to get the words out.

Hela is there soon too, but she isn’t looking at the table at all when she takes Loki’s hand. She takes stuttering breaths before she manages to say what she’s come to say.

“Let’s go back up, Loki.”

“That’s not him... that’s not Thor... that’s the Inside Out Man—you—you remember, right?”

Hela’s face breaks, and she cups his cheeks with both hands, turning his face to look at her. Loki sees the pain in her eyes, sees the dark bags under them, sees how pale she is. He’s terrified she’s not going to believe him.

Instead, Hela says the thing he hadn’t expected from her at all—and feels how sincere she is when she says it too. 

“I know, little brother. I believe you.”

It’s the only thing that makes Loki crack, and soon, he’s crying too. 

“I don’t... I don’t understand... I don’t understand—“ Loki gasps.

“Take my hand, little brother. Let me fix it.”

The whisper of Thor’s voice comes from where he’s still lying on the hard metal slab. Loki half expects to find himself in the garden when he turns to look. /Hopes/ he’s in the garden.

He isn’t.

He’s still in the morgue.

"Let me help you," he hears Thor's voice clear as day in his ears. His feet bring him to the table again, ignoring Tony and Hela's protests.

He can't look away, he can't stop staring, his mind both blank and overloaded with emotion. Shaking, he reaches out and takes Thor's charred hand. 

"I'm sorry," he sobs. "I'm sorry I didn't answer." 

"It's okay," Thor replies and Loki looks up from the body on the table to see his brother smiling up at him. Loki opens his hand and mud falls to the grass under his feet. 

"It doesn't hurt anymore," Thor tells him. "It hurt a lot, all the time, ever since... before. Now it doesn't hurt anymore, and I can play forever." 

"But you're not /here/, with /me/," Loki protests, tears streaming unbidden down his cheeks. He sniffles, wiping a hand across his face. 

Thor takes his hand in his smaller one. "Was I really there in the first place?" he asks. "I tried to protect you as much as I could. I tucked you in the garden when things got scary."

Loki nods, the smell of fresh cut grass overwhelming his senses. "I remember now," he says. And he does, half his mind clear on all the things that had gone bump in the night, the other half stuck in the garden on one particular summer day. 

"Someday you and Hela and Heimdall can be here too," Thor adds. "I'll wait for you here. Me and mom and dad and Hela's family. We're all here, waiting." His brother screws up his little face for a moment. "But please don't rush to get here. I went through a lot to make sure you have a good life from now on."

Loki nods, unable to speak, his mouth open and silent sobs wracking his shoulders with shudders. "I'm sorry," he mouths. 

"Me too," Thor says, and kisses Loki's palm.

\- - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**************

Loki sits as far away as he can from the scary thing claiming to be his older brother, occasionally throwing looks over his shoulder to where his /real/ brother is. Thor is still on the bed, asleep.

No, tucked away. That’s what the Inside Out Man—/this/ Thor—said.

It has to be his brother, though. It has to be, because this creature knows everything about him. Knows what Loki’s favorite food and color are, knows where his favorite hiding places are—it even knows things Loki had forgotten, but remembers when the... man tells him. 

The Inside Out Man—big Thor—sighs.

“Listen, I know I look scary, but I promise I only want to protect you. Always.”

“Why do you look like that?”

“I made some mistakes. I’m trying to fix them,” Thor tells him.

He seems to know that Loki doesn’t want him near and starts inching away. Somehow, it makes Loki feel sad.

“I just want you to know that I’ll do my best. Sometimes it won’t be enough, but when those times come, please remember how much I love you, okay? I’ll make it better. I’ll even make it so you don’t have to remember seeing me this way. I’ll tuck you away in the garden.”

“That was a fun day,” Loki agrees, looking back at the smaller Thor. “He’ll remember you though. It’ll be scary for him. Can you make it so I remember you too? But I don’t remember you’re /you/. I don’t... I don’t want to remember you’re.. that you’re gone.”

No, Loki doesn’t want to remember that. He doesn’t want to live knowing that some day, even in the far, far future, his big brother is going to die. He doesn’t want to know that Thor was sad and... and...

“Hey, don’t cry, Loki. Don’t cry,” the older Thor says, sounding pained.

“How can I help? I can help you, right? I don’t want you to die,” Loki sobs, “I don’t want you to die, ever!”

The Inside Out Man, his big brother’s ghost, sighs. “I’d rather you didn’t, little brother. Just... just tell us you love us, that’ll be enough.”

Loki flings himself at this grotesque looking monster, his fear of how it looks obscured by his fear of losing his big brother, and wraps his arms around the man’s neck. Thor wraps his arms around Loki’s back, too. It doesn’t feel like embracing a ghost or a ghoul—it feels like... it feels like hugging his brother. 

Warmth.

Safety.

Love.

“Thor—“

“Shh, shh. It’s okay. You don’t have to say anything. I’ll tuck you away, and you won’t remember who I am, but in the meantime, you’ll have him,” Thor tells him, nodding his head towards his younger self. “He loves you too. He’ll protect you. No matter what, Loki, always remember that we love you. We might be a bit broken, but never doubt that.”

“Will I see you again?”

“You will.”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
****************

Loki sits at the table of the breakfast joint he and Thor had come to not even three months ago. Hela and Heimdall sit across him, and Tony is beside him, yet Loki has never felt more alone.

There’s a mug of coffee in front of him, but Loki can’t bring himself to even warm his hands on the glass. 

He doesn’t want to wash off the feeling of Thor’s kiss on his palm.

Doesn’t want to wash off the feeling of his brother’s... his brother’s dead... dead bony hands in his...

He realizes he’s crying again, but he doesn’t even care.

Loki doesn’t care about anything.

The others are silent around him, Tony occasionally peeking over but otherwise quiet for a change. 

It doesn't bring his brother back. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**********

"So I thought my family issues and your family issues could get worked on together. What do you say?" Tony claps his hands together. 

"Say yes." Loki feels wet mud in his hand and Thor's touch on his arm. "He'll protect you when I can't anymore." 

"You'll always protect me," Loki protests. 

Thor smiles that smile the color of nightshade. "I'm going to try," he says. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**********

It's a closed casket funeral, attended by only the four of them and the funeral director. 

It's raining as Loki watches his big brother's coffin get lowered into the ground between Odin and Frigga's, none of them willing to unearth their parents to keep Thor from being buried on the property. 

Loki tries not to think about the fact all three of them had died here, all three of them by their own hand. He tries not to think of how desperate Thor must have been in the end, what it must have taken to light the match and go up in flames. 

Tony shifts closer and wraps an arm around Loki's waist, holding the umbrella a little higher so it doesn't bump against Loki's forehead. "Did you want to say anything?" he asks softly. 

Loki takes a shaking breath. That's what they should do, isn't it? They should... say something.

"I'll say something," Hela offers, taking a step forward to the edge of the grave. Her breathing is unsteady and she looks nearly as devastated as the night of the accident. "I didn't believe anything Thor ever told us. He was sick, and he was sad, and he was damaged. It always seemed like he took more than he gave. But... I was wrong. I was wrong all this time. Thor protected us all, he... He was brave. Braver than me, anyway. And I'm sorry I never gave him credit for the stories." She leans over, picks up a handful of mud, sprinkles it as best she can over the coffin lid. "Love you, little brother. We'll see you in the garden."

Heimdall goes next, stepping forward after giving Hela a quick hug, whispering something in her ear that has her nodding as she tries to contain herself. Loki gives her an empty smile. He doesn’t really have any opinion on what she had to say, but at least she’d gone and said /something/.

“Raising Thor was a challenge,” Heimdall starts. “More than raising his siblings, in any case.” 

At this, Hela huffs out a laugh. Loki just keeps staring at the coffin in the ground.

“He was often in his own mind, fighting his own demons, and at the same time, trying so, so hard to be present for what remained of his family. He had the weight of the world on his shoulders since he was a child, and he bore them by himself stubbornly, as only a child could. Thor was like that. Kind—never wanting to share whatever plagued him, whatever haunted him, to the point where he had done the very things that he wanted to prevent.”

Loki looks up at Heimdall, who looks as though he’s aged another fifty years since they’d last seen each other.

“Until the very end, such a stubborn boy,” Heimdall sobs. “Such a stubborn, stubborn boy.”

The man looks up, taking a deep breath, then another.

“He was my son, my child, as much as he was Odin and Frigga’s, much like his siblings are. They are my family in every way that matters. I love him, and I will miss him.”

Just like Hela, he grabs a handful of mud and throws it into the open pit.

They wait until Loki finally steps forward, out of the safety of Tony’s umbrella, and bends over to take some of the slushy mud too.

The feel of it is familiar in his hand, but at the same time, it’s so, so different. The sun isn’t shining, and the only smell that permeates all around is the scent of dampened soil and the lingering acrid stench of the fire. There aren’t any peals of laughter ringing, no mom humming a soft tune beside him, no dad mowing the grass on the other end. Only rain—and surprisingly, after a minute, his own voice.

“The earliest memory I have is of my brother,” Loki says. Closing his eyes, he can almost imagine himself there. “I’m on his lap, and he’s pretending to read me stories.”

He pauses, starting to shake.

“I remember his warmth, how loudly he laughed... I remember pulling his hair,” Loki bites his lip to keep it from wobbling, then he continues. “But what I remembered most was how he’d held me. He always kept his arms around me—always there to keep me steady if I seemed like I was about to fall. And all this time... all this time, he was the one that was falling... and I never...”

Loki stops. 

“He doesn’t... he didn’t even know...”

No, Thor never even knew that they didn’t actually share any blood. Not that it matters... Loki knows Thor would’ve loved him regardless.

“He was my big brother. And now he’s gone.”

Loki sniffs once, loudly, unable to even try for any sort of decorum in this moment. "I'm going to miss him forever."

A small, warm hand wraps around his wrist and he looks down to see his brother, the child from the garden, looking down into the hole along with him. "Not forever," he says. "We'll wait for you. We'll be together again." The touch fades and Loki opens his hand, letting the mud splatter on the coffin lid as surely as it had once splattered across Thor's grinning face. 

They can't stand there for eternity, much as Loki might want to. He wants to just stand in this one spot until his time comes and he can be with his brother, can assure him that he understands. That he forgives Thor for everything. Can beg for forgiveness of his own sins that had helped lead Thor here. 

But instead, Tony leads him back to the car, and back to whatever sort of life exists without his brother in it.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
***********

Thor bounces the baby on his knees. "Do you want to hear a story, Fenris?" he asks his nephew. "I can tell you a story I told your mom if you want."

The baby doesn't talk or anything. It's just a baby and mom says it will always be a baby, but Thor loves him anyway, ever since the moment he arrived, along with another splinter of himself and a man who keeps to the edges of the garden, waiting for someone. 

"Once upon a time, there was a princess and two princes..."

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
*********

Loki turns the book over in his hands, at the cover with its photograph of the three of them as children, a Polaroid, Thor in the middle, his face split into a big gap-toothed grin. 

"This one's a true story," Hela offers when he looks up at her in surprise. "About Thor. About - I just - I put it all in. Let the audience decide what they think. I just - owed it to him."

Loki nods, fingers tracing the words on the cover, the title - The Truth About Ghosts - and the byline: Hela Odinsdottir and Thor Odinson. "I'll read it," he promises.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
*****************

“It’s...” Loki starts, trying to find the right words to say as Hela sits across him on the table. The visiting hall is packed, murmurs echoing as inmates met with their families. “It’s okay, I guess...”

Hela snorts. “Which part didn’t you like?”

Loki huffs. He crosses his arms over his chest. He doesn’t want to be mean and say he hated all of it—but he did. Though obviously well-written, it uses his... /their/ lives as fodder.

“Did you send Thor a copy?”

Hela’s face hardens. “Thor doesn’t deserve shit.”

“It’s his story too.”

Hela looks away, but she doesn’t rebuff. Hopefully, she’ll reconsider and make some edits to her final draft. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
*****************

As he’d promised, Loki finds himself the time to sit down and read Hela’s book before the drop date. He’d been putting it off, sure that the memories will overwhelm him, but he figures that he needs to know that Hela did their brother justice. 

The foreword goes:

Most of the time, ghost stories aren't really about actual ghosts. In fact, most ghost stories are about the other kind. The kind that haunt memories, the kind that make you tense up when you hear a certain song, or smell a certain type of cookie baking.

They’re often about grief.

About guilt.

Regret. 

Most ghost stories are, however, at their heart, about love.

This story is a story about the love of a mother for her children, and the love her children had for each other. It's about a brand of love that leads to heartache and sacrifice, but it is love nonetheless. 

This is a ghost story.

This is a love story. 

This is an elegy for my little brother, who lost himself to the ghosts, but who never stopped loving us. 

Thank you, Thor.

You are deeply missed every single day. I hope you know, though I’ve never said or shown it, how much I loved you. That regret will be the ghost I’ll carry for the rest of my life. 

We’ll see each other again in the garden, and I’ll have more stories to tell you when I get there.

——————

Loki closes the book, closing his eyes against the tight knot in his chest. He knows that grief is just love letting go, but in this case... he doesn’t know if it’ll ever go away.

He reaches over towards the bedside table and grabs his phone, scrolling through the screen until he finds it.

He hits play, and presses the phone against his ear.

“Hey, little brother... I don’t know if you’re awake and just don’t want to talk to me, but I... I just need you to listen, okay? I just need you to listen...”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
**********

"It's my brother," Loki says, standing and pointing at his phone. Tony doesn't put down his chopsticks, but he does point them at Loki as he says, 

"Tell him Palm Springs is great this time of year and he should come hang out."

Loki scrunches up his face. The last thing he wants is for Tony and Thor to meet; if only because the combination of both their egos and idiosyncrasies in the same room might cause some sort of collapse of the universe. But it's mostly because Loki doesn't want Tony to know how bad off his brother is, and he doesn't want Thor lifting any of Tony's money or belongings. He's finally feeling comfortable and stable, he doesn't want Thor to disrupt it. 

"What is it?" he asks when he finally answers the phone. 

Thor's voice on the other end of the line sounds both childlike and gravelly. On something, clearly, and Loki sighs. "Hold my hand when you get there," his brother says. 

"Call me back when you've sobered up," Loki snaps and hangs up. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW  
**********

Loki stands in the foyer of his new house and looks up at the soaring steel and glass construction of the ultra-modern mansion Tony has had constructed over the burnt-out remains of the old manor. So different from the dark stone and wood of his childhood home, but it's a welcome difference. 

"So? What do you think?" Tony asks, as if Loki'd had nothing to do with the design of the place. As if Tony hadn't asked for his input multiple times a day during the process. 

Loki nods. It feels light and airy, but empty. His brother, his mother, his father... they aren't here. Their bodies are, out at the edge of the property, but Loki can't feel anything anymore where the house once stood.

He walks through the first floor and out onto the back patio, overlooking the garden Loki had insisted on preserving and maintaining. The place of his last good memory. The place he'll someday meet his brother again, if anything of Thor even remains. 

"Hela and Heimdall are on their way," Tony says from behind him. "You don't want to miss the party, do you?"

Loki smiles softly, sadly. "No, of course not," he replies, turning back to the new house, heading inside where a veritable feast has been laid out. 

A joint party, Tony had insisted, for Hela's successful book release, for the finished construction of the mansion and, as it so happened, what would have been Thor's thirty-seventh birthday. 

There's even a cake with his brother's name on it. Loki looks down at it and shakes his head, a rueful chuckle escaping past his lips. "It's strawberry with chocolate frosting," Tony boasts, "I did my homework." 

Loki turns from the cake to his fiance. "Thank you," he breathes, trying not to break down just now. Not when there will be people arriving. 

Later, when they're alone again.

“Sure, sweet cheeks. Go wash your face.”

Loki does as he’s told, heading for the bathroom and taking his time. He can’t quite stop himself from staring as he looks up from the sink to the mirror, can’t quite stop himself from wishing the shadows in the corners of his eyes take form, can’t quite stop himself from /hoping/.

By the time he gets back, Hela and Heimdall are taking off their coats.

“Hey. How was the trip?”

“Bumpy as ever. We should get a petition going to get the road fixed,” Hela sighs, then comes over to wrap Loki in a tight hug. “I love the new look.”

Loki smiles, hugging her just as tightly before pulling away.

“Yeah, well. I could go all out with the funding I had.”

And just like that, they fall back into the same pattern—missing a piece, but still managing.

One day at a time.

Loki thinks he can do that.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THEN  
***************

Thor waits at the edge of the garden, hearing the liveliness of the place behind him. The house is full, and he can hear the echo of pounding footsteps even from where he’s standing.

“Coming inside, my little spark? The snacks are ready.”

“I’ll wait for him here, mama.”

The swish-swish of mama’s dress soon joins the cacophony of sounds that have gone inside the house. 

Thor waits a little longer.

And some more.

And some more.

For years and years and years, he waits.

Heimdall arrives, then Hela, then the man Loki had loved.

Thor keeps waiting.

When he finally hears the plop-plop-plop of footsteps behind him, he grins, turning around just in time to get a face full of mud. Thor sputters, swiping at his eyes, then pretends to glare at Loki, who looks confused.

“I... Thor? Are you... are you really here?” Loki says, uncertain. His eyes start tearing up. Thor smiles at him and nods. “Am I dead?”

“No,” Thor says, walking over and offering his hand. “You’re home.”

Loki reaches out and takes it, smiling, and together they walk to join their family.


End file.
